The First Fall Rain

Nobel Prize, 1951: Glenn T. Seaborg
Glenn T. Seaborg, with Edwin M. McMillan for "their discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranic elements."


"A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?" - Albert Einstein

"Keep your feet on the ground and your thoughts at lofty heights." - Peace Pilgrim

"I have my values, and if you don't like them, well I've got some others." - Mark Twain

"If you don't like something change it; if you can't change it, change the way you think about it." - Mary Engelbreit

Just to keep people informed, recently I was blessed by the gods of facebook when on a whim I searched for a "best friend" that I lost touch with over fifty years ago. We were blessed with the fact that his name is even more rare than mine. There were not many possibilities and so I chose the most likely one and got it right the first time. This is the picture I guessed was my friend. It looked like it was taken a few years back to me. Can you see the ten year old boy in this man? I thought I could.

Fifty years plus of absence and now we are present to one another once more. And more. We are still compatible. I believe he feels the same. We were children in a modest Berkeley, California neighborhood where many of the residents were college employees and students, where Glenn Seaborg, a nuclear physicist lived just around the corner before he became nationally known, where he lived when he got his Nobel Prize. I played with Glenn's son, Peter, but we were not close. My mother was a student and then a teacher at Cal in those days. My step dad played on the championship Golden Bears football team. They won the Rose Bowl. That I believe was 1948, when I was three.

I was in second and third grade. My friend Conal Boyce was in third and fourth. He told me just the other day about a father figure in his life, and I guess a little in mine. Conal had a cloud chamber in his house for a time, built by his mentor, a device where you can see the tracks left by cosmic rays as they pass through. I remember it, or I think I do. I know I remember some cloud chamber somewhere. You see, Conal and I both knew about nuclear stuff in 1952 and 1953, before either of us we were ten. Conal became a Harvard graduate, a PhD specializing in things Chinese, a Sinologist, and later in life, he has also become a theoretical chemist and philosopher of science. Me, I became a counter culture guy and then an Engineering Designer with a degree in Philosophy and Psychology.

Yesterday was a beautiful day and today as well, except for the biting winter's wind that is informing the departure of fall. So today I shall recall September, but not this September. I wrote this poem about September a year ago. As I have been at pains to mention from time to time, the date and time beneath the poem is when it was written and occasionally a date is added as to when I edited it in some (usually minor) way.

The First Fall Rain

Look how our summer
days have washed away with rain
sent insistently
by the weather god
who has forced the sun lower
in my heart.

I find
you rejoicing. He
has called you out while I sit
in my study writing
how lovely your scent
is to me in the moist bright
air of this first rain.

September 13, 2009 11:32 AM

Inspiration

El Maestro by Elena Dudina

"We need not think of rebirth only in a future life. We are in actual fact reborn every moment with new thoughts and feelings, and we bring with us the karma that we made in past moments. If we were angry a moment ago, we are not going to feel good immediately. If we were loving a minute ago, we would be feeling fine now. Thus we live from moment to moment with the results of our karma. Every morning, particularly, can be seen as a rebirth. The day is young, we are full of energy, and have a whole day ahead of us. Every moment we get older and are tired enough in the evening to fall asleep and die a small death. All we can do then is toss and turn in bed, and our mind is dreamy and foggy. Every day can be regarded as a whole lifespan, since we can only live one day at a time; the past is gone and the future may or may not come; only this rebirth, this day, this moment, is important." - Ayya Khema

Being reborn every moment is actually radically true. Just as there is a blind spot in your eye that you have trained into not seeing, the gaps in your presence on the planet are also invisible. It is part of meditation practice to become mindful enough to shatter the habits of mind that prevent seeing reality for what it is. One of the things that LSD can do is shatter that training, but it is not predictable in two main ways, first you may not go there even if you want to, and second if you do it might be beautiful or it might be ugly, it might be serene or it might be a nightmare and it is not controllable nor does it subside quickly.

***a dream***

I shall let this go into the world though it will not say what it once said, now that the wall has toppled and the tower has fallen. The dragon's egg has crumbled to dust and my heart drowned in its own red blood. She has lost the throne to treachery and I could not stop it. They bound me so that I could not speak. They bound me so that my limbs could not sign. They blinded me so that I could not emit the light and they stopped my ears with wax so that my inner song could not come forth.

When they let me go, after they had done what they intended, I was left with this to say, shining and then dimming before me so that now the Word is just words.

Inspiration

Oh doubters of the Word
remember that Word is the heart
of magic, the heart of God,
the start of the world,
the color of Truth.

Oh believers in the Word
forget not the work,
nor the threads of the weave,
nor the roots of the world,
revealed when we sing the Truth,
sing the fiery incantation.

September 13, 2009 7:45 AM

Apian Fate

To Know Her Is To Love Her

"In the part of this universe that we know there is great injustice, and often the good suffer, and often the wicked prosper, and one hardly knows which of those is the more annoying." - Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970)

"But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters a man has always been free to ruin himself if he chose." - G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936), What's Wrong With the World; p. 118

(I tried.)

"Man has to suffer. When he has no real afflictions, he invents some." - Jose Marti

(Ouch! This one hurts.)

"Do unto others 20% better than you would expect them to do unto you, to correct for subjective error." - Linus Pauling

(My Dad, a school administrator by trade, tried to teach me about the illusion of central position when I was in high school. The illusion of central position is the primary source of subjective error.)

Love is really complicated. The primary source of love's complications are the astonishing varieties of ways that the illusion that I am central to the heart of things can manifest, often so subtly that I may remain in the dark about it for years.

Apian Fate

As you say, I left.
I had to go, inner truth -
but I will die now,
die from my barb placed
deep in your dreams - it has ripped
my guts out - stranded,
hanging forlorn, lost,
and me leaking from the wound,
my faltering flight
is all I have left
now that I had to leave you.
Lover, I weep, weep.

September 13, 2009 10:16 AM

The Healing

"The excursion is the same when you go looking for your sorrow as when you go looking for your joy." - Eudora Welty

"Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding." - Kahlil Gibran

Sometimes I have to go my own way. Sometimes the apparent right thing is not the right thing. How can we know? If I had gone down that fork in the road instead of this one everything would be different. Or maybe not. How can we know? How dare I say things like, "It's for the best?" Yet I do and so do you. It's what we do.

Sometimes I feel like not knowing will paralyze me. Sometimes I do better.

When I was much younger I felt that what I didn't know might kill me. What you didn't know might kill me too. The burden of things - it just made sense to drink, drink heavily. So I did, this after it was clearly demonstrated to me that I was not wanted. I really did nearly die of this. It was a long time ago, a whole lifetime.

The Healing

When I was so sick
you fed me your fish stock soup
made the old time way
and you hummed a song
that felt stronger than the oak,
the tree in your yard
where the squirrels live
and those wise black crows light,
but it's best this way.

September 11, 2009 9:53 AM
Last line changed
‎December 2, ‎2010 7:14 PM

Crossing Broken Ground

"We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization." - Martin Luther King, Jr

"Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving." - Kahlil Gibran

"I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out." - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much a heart can hold." - Zelda Fitzgerald

Elena Dudina again...Here's the white queen, one of them, anyway.

Just what would I do for love?


Crossing Broken Ground

If I handed you
a twilight gray dove ready
to fly high for peace
could you find it in
your holy graces to accept
me as your lover?
Is there a dragon
I must slay, or an ocean
I must cross as well?

These were the questions
I thought to ask the white queen
as I descended
the oaken stile raised
to span the broken ground found
askew between us.

September 10, 2009 12:40 PM

What Is Due You

"Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest." - Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)

"Sometimes love will pick you up by the short hairs...and jerk the heck out of you." - Denise Dobbs, Northern Exposure, Survival of the Species, 1993

"I am going to concentrate on what's important in life. I'm going to strive everyday to be a kind and generous and loving person. I'm going to keep death right here, so that anytime I even think about getting angry at you or anybody else, I'll see death and I'll remember." - Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, Do The Right Thing, 1992

(I think we can thank Carlos Castaneda and his stories of Don Juan Matus, brujo, for this consciousness in the mainstream media of death as teacher. At least that is where I learned the wisdom of making death your ally - not a friend but a helper nonetheless)

"Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek & find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it." - Rumi

(to live in avoidance of mortality is one of the barriers)




What Is Due You

If I left kisses
on your lips I would expect,
even demand so
sternly precisely
nothing in return. I would
hold you to that, chained
with your promise to
simply accept these kisses
as what is due you.

September 10, 2009 9:22 PM

Among The Lesser Blue Stars

Stardust in Aries (The Lesser Blue Stars)
Credit & Copyright: Alessandro Falesiedi
Explanation: This composition in stardust covers almost 2 degrees on the sky, close to the border of the zodiacal constellation Aries and the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy. At the lower right of the gorgeous skyscape is a dusty blue reflection nebula surrounding a bright star cataloged as van den Bergh 13 (vdB 13), about 1,000 light-years away. At that estimated distance, the cosmic canvas is over 30 light-years across. Also surrounded by scattered blue starlight, vdB 16 lies toward the upper left, while dark dusty nebulae sprawl across the scene. Near the edge of a large molecular cloud, they can hide newly formed stars and young stellar objects or protostars from prying optical telescopes. Collapsing due to self-gravity, the protostars form around dense cores embedded in the molecular cloud.

"Every time you don't follow your inner guidance, you feel a loss of energy, loss of power, a sense of spiritual deadness." - Shakti Gawain

"The arts must be considered an essential element of education... They are tools for living life reflectively, joyfully and with the ability to shape the future." - Shirley Trusty Corey

"If you look at life (only) one way, there is always cause for alarm." - Elizabeth Bowen (1899 - 1973)

"If you have made mistakes, even serious ones, there is always another chance for you. What we call failure is not the falling down but the staying down." - Mary Pickford (1893 - 1979)

Among The Lesser Blue Stars

On my route, heaven
bound, I heard you call me back
and I have come here
to breathe with you now.

It is no small feat, to sing
me home. I was far
among the lesser
blue stars, crossing comet-like,
all ice and gray snow.

September 9, 2009 12:58 PM

In Passing

- a leaf cutter worker ant courtesy the National Geographic


"To forgive is indeed the best form of self-interest since anger, resentment, and revenge are corrosive of that "summum bonum," the greatest good." - Bishop Desmond Tutu

"The practice of peace and reconciliation is one of the most vital and artistic of human actions." - Thich Nhat Hanh

(this is to say that there are practices which aim at developing the necessary skills and that free an intuitive capacity - that lead to empowerment in a real sense and that are required if one is to advance very far spiritually)

"Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil;
With them forgive yourself." - William Shakespeare

"The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

No shape shifter is ever evil before learning to shift. All pass through forgiveness first, compassion and clarity first, and then develop the skill before turning evil. There is no way to protect against this feature of free will.

Shape shifting. I made a mistake one day and ended in an ant body, female of course, and just a worker, not a soldier, not an attendant to the queen. A forager is what I was. See above. Funny. I thought that was you who passed by.

If you want to shape shift you have to be prepared. You won't be any more perfect there than anywhere else in your life. Ending in the wrong body can be embarrassing and worse. There is always the chance that something happens that will make you forget how to get back...but really that's pretty rare since you will have your own will to live supporting your return. I am really grateful for that.

*sigh of relief*

In Passing

Walking the ant road,
all six legs in tune, feelers
on the wide alert,
and so here you come
the other way. I smell you
before I see you
and now! feelers out,
tangle, untangle. Though I
expected Plato,
I got, "here I am",
the symphony of presence,
and then you went on.

September 7, 2009 3:49 PM

Moon In Pisces

"The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's own, or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's own imagination. This at least is what I see at moments of insight: but it's hard to remember it all the time." - C. S. Lewis

CLIMBING THE MOUNTAIN
I burned incense, swept the earth, and waited
for a poem to come . . .

Then I laughed, and climbed the mountain,
leaning on my staff.

How I'd love to be a master
of the blue sky's art:

see how many sprigs of snow-white cloud
he's brushed in so far today.
- Yuan Mei

I am framed in archetype, framed in Moon in Pisces, in a form called a bucket, but not so extreme as to be held as one holds a handle. Indeed my form is difficult as well as easy, most of a grand cross as well as grand trine. Hidden within this mostly regular shape are lines of fate. I have never been in charge of my own life as some are. In my height I am expansive, and tell my stories but in my depth lies the cool dark of the open ocean and I am too far from land for landing and for comfort. But I am wise, Oh my Son, Oh my Daughter, and Brother, Sister, I sing the very lines that hold the stars in place.

Here is the Moon, coming for me
escalones, by Elena Dudina, Spanish Photoshop artist

Moon In Pisces

Moon has been my guide
as I quest for the old cup,
following the path
of her rays.

She lies
in my heart as a wanton
in my bed, hungry
and taking all I
offer, demanding yet more
before she wanes, wanes
and I fade with her.

I've gone further than my eyes,
shining, free of shame,
at last, free of shame.

September 7, 2009 2:13 PM

I Heard You Sing

Miradita by Elena Dudina

(Elena Dudina was awarded as the Best Photo Manipulator during the Deviant Awards 2009-2010. She was chosen through a popular votation. Elena Dudina is from Spain. This very talented lady often depicts fantasy, emotionally dramatic, and dark themes on her photo manipulation. And in most of her artworks, the subject would be a woman. Elena Dudina has been doing photo manipulation for more than two years already.)

(I comment: she presents illustrations of the Goddess.)

"Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns to be amused rather than shocked." - Pearl S. Buck

People like you and I, though mortal of course like everyone else, do not grow old no matter how long we live...[We] never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born." - letter to Otto Juliusburger - Albert Einstein

"You desire to know the art of living, my friend? It is contained in one phrase: make use of suffering." - Henri-Frederic Amiel

"I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness and the willingness to remain vulnerable." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

"Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit." - Peter Ustinov

Ever the romantic, the fantasist, it is easy for me to collapse the figure of one woman with another, and then with my liege, my queen, and then beyond with Goddess, another name of God and so with everything. I prefer this to the lesser loves. The last time I had the privilege of falling like this, on the way down, knowing that first I was going to be ravished, my words to all of it were, "Ohhh! This is really going to hurt!"

That's a revelation. I would do it again too were I able to roll it all back to that point and kind of know what was to come. I mean, I kind of did know what was to come. The two years gave me a great gift. I could not be the man I am today without that experience, all of it. It changed my art while it deepened my philosophy to love like that. Further, it revealed to me in several ways the shape of my courage. Reinhold Niebuhr's famous prayer asks for grants of serenity, courage and wisdom. AAs feel this prayer central to their need and courage is central to the prayer. I definitely paid a price but when it was demanded of me in that time that I regret my choice I was able to accept that some saw me differently from the way I saw myself and refuse to deflect from my course. This was a big period in my life as long time readers of my blog know.

I Heard You Sing

Reaching for your song,
sung so far away from here,
from where I hold sway,
from this corner stone
I set for you in the wall
as it turns.

The point
of the turning wall
is this corner and the place
of rest I found there
on the western side,
the warm sunset side, the place
of your forgiveness.

September 7, 2009 1:30 PM

What I Said To Her

"Each person must live their life as a model for others." - Rosa Parks

"We as for long life, but 'tis deep life, or noble moments that signify. Let the measure of time be spiritual, not mechanical." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Now there is one outstandingly important fact regarding Spaceship Earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it." - Buckminster Fuller

"To live in this world you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go." - Blackwater Woods - Mary Oliver

On this Thanksgiving Day I am spending most of it alone.

What I Said To Her

I wish I had words
enough to really say it
but of course I don't.

I would touch you there
and watch your world change from top
to bottom, from bud
to fragrant bright bloom
as if I had that power,
a true timeless mage.

Can you know this ache
in me, this want, this pent up
life about to burst?

September 7, 2009 9:58 AM

Catnip Dreams

The older I get the more valuable naps get. When I am idle, laid off or something, it gets irregular around here because I tend to sleep whenever I feel like it and this entails being awake also whenever I feel like it. I get more sleep, not less. I sleep less than six hours a night on work nights. I get up really early and I just can't go to bed that early to compensate so what happens is Friday night extends quite late into Saturday and then there are the day naps, and then the Saturday night sleep in as well. I am grateful that I can sleep easily, but truth is, I am up quite often with an old man's trouble. A third of us or so have this, mostly benign but intrusive, and it is said that if we could live long enough, avoiding all the other ways out, then prostate cancer would claim us all eventually. I am kind of okay with that because I am pretty sure its the same with cats and kidneys, that kidneys get them eventually if nothing else does first.

My right hip is giving me fits these days, and a fairly simple maneuver led to a seized muscle just above the hip joint and extending toward the back but staying in the buttock area alongside the spine. What a pain in the ass. It hasn't kept me home but only because my work is basically office bound these days. If I had to do much walking I would have to not go. I can find still positions which do not distress me but movement and balancing is dicey.

Growing old is not for sissies.

Education is the best provision for the journey to old age. - Aristotle

Forty is the old age of youth, fifty is the youth of old age. - Hosea Ballou
(Hosea Ballou (1771-1852), American Universalist clergyman - as in Unitarian Universalist)

Fundamental Universalism = "We either all go to Heaven or we don't" - Phil Carrier (obscure local Senior Engineering Designer and family man) Amen, Brother!

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. - Albert Einstein

With 60 staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and a definite hardening of the paragraphs. - James Thurber

What most persons consider as virtue, after the age of 40 is simply a loss of energy. - Voltaire

We should so provide for old age that it may have no urgent wants of this world to absorb it from meditation on the next. - Pearl S. Buck

Catnip Dreams

If you let me be
laying on your blue blanket
I would curl up tight
and with a snore or
two would dream a partner next
to me, just a bit
different, longer
tail, spots, a fondness for nip,
a ready mouser.

September 2, 2009 3:47 PM

The Doe's Sorrow

My wife and I, we had a pair of tomcats, brothers, who were obviously close. We named them Philip Berrigan Cat and Joltin Joe Frasier Cat. Orange marmalade toms, they were. Berrigan was a little shy. Frasier was out there. We had them about two years when Frasier left us. We never found out why but he never came back. Berrigan was devastated. After a while it was obvious that even if he was forgetting his brother he wasn't forgetting his grief. It changed him from a slightly shy pretty happy cat to a somber creature who was much more leary of things and far needier too. If you have been around very many cats, you will know this type. They vary around the theme of not having enough something, never enough. Berrigan was that way after he lost his brother but not before.

To indulge like that makes one less able to survive, because the deflection in one's person steals from awareness and alertness, from engagement and commitment. While my cat had room to carry long term grief in this sideways way - even having forgotten the cause but not the grief - and it turning into something plaintive and unhappy but not directly expressible, so that it leaks and spills in odd places and ways. While my cat could live like this, a wild doe cannot, and my cat, had he been feral, this complex might have killed him. This began when he was not yet four. He lived to nineteen yrs, four mos. As far as I could see, he never healed. In the end he was deaf and blind and just really really old.

The Doe’s Sorrow

When I came upon
the dead fawn my heart dissolved
in the error’s wake
and I thought then
of the doe who watched her fawn
struck down before her
broken eyes. Driven
to her knees, her dugs in pain,
her heart pain throbbing
and then she must bolt,
she must forget and go on.
This fawn never was.

September 2, 2009 12:41 PM

Evening Drink

"I'm an idealist. I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way." - Carl Sandburg

"Never let your sense of morals get in the way of doing what's right." - Isaac Asimov

"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo

"If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

"Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don't we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go - we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night's sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself." - Jack Kornfield

Gate, gate
paragate,
parasamgate,
bodhi swaha.
- Buddhist Mantra

"Gone, gone beyond,
really gone beyond,
really most utterly gone beyond,
salute this wisdom."

Evening Drink

Look at the sweet flow
spilling from the ewer's lip
like my heart's warm pulse.
It threads the late air
on it's well aimed way into
my waiting wide cup.
Swirling up and back
to settle in a golden
pool, there it fire shines.

September 1, 2009 12:56 PM

Clipped Wings

Time by ~imperioli

"Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." - Martin Luther King Jr

"Someday we'll look back on this moment and plow into a parked car." - Evan Davis, Presenter for the BBC

"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult." - Rita Rudner, Comedienne

"If we don't change direction soon, we'll end up where we're going." - Professor Irwin Corey, American comedian, satirist and pantomimist

I think there is no doubt that I am creatively maladjusted. However, I do not feel the fate of humanity is in my hands. I do feel a destiny. I hope that I am aligned with it in some way. I hope that my poetry and the other things I write and gather are part of that instead of a side note or worse, a diversion. I look over on my table beside me where I have a slew of papers, many of them the effluvia of my life, especially the bills that come due. At one end of the pile lies a manila folder and in that folder, usually six to a page, are hard copies of the poems I have written. There are about two hundred pages. This is part of my back up system. I have another set of these poems at work, in a file cabinet there. I also have them saved off on a remote drive. But I have no idea if any of that is important. Save them for what? I think there is no doubt I am creatively maladjusted.

Clipped Wings

To think of you with
wings is to lift my own heart
into the slipstream
of your feather light
flight beyond the slow moving
silver moon, twilight
colored sky, sunset
calling out your name and mine,
but I have clipped wings.

August 31, 2009 3:53 PM

Archeology

"zen" by Gabriel Nardelli


"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good." - Vaclav Havel

"I have my values, and if you don't like them, well I've got some others." - Mark Twain

"Feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavor and human creations." - Albert Einstein

"By believing passionately in something that does not yet exist, we create it." - Nikos Kazantzaki

I am listening to Pandora Radio these days. This has been eye opening. They have such a wide selection of music. I have found mine. Eric Whiteacre and other choral masters. Contemporary Folk. Dar Williams and Bruce Cockburn. Arvo Part and other masters of modern music. Deva Premal and other chant and devotional music. It inspired me to purchase some other stuff. I was singing in Unistus, a choral group focussing on Estonian folk music and other forms too. We sang in Eesti. We went to festivals and performed. Everyone was strong musically and mainly better than me at sight reading. It was one of the better experiences of my life, a few years of stretching and learning. There was even a chance in some near future of a trip to Estonia. They may have gone by now. Allergies wrecked my stability as a performer. It broke my heart. I still hurt. There is nothing to be done.

One of the best parts, we had a relationship with Sonfonia Conertante, a pro orchestra in the area run as a pet project by the former maestro of the Portland Opera. They would do Bach's Christmas Oratorio and it needed a choir with the orchestra. I did that several Christmas seasons - an amazing experience to sing with the big dogs. Four pros as the soloists, all pros in the orchestra. What a blessing. I will be forever grateful both that I had the chance and that I measured up. Age has caught me though. That's it.

I can have the sound in my house though. I can surround myself with the shards of song. I can visualize what it would be like to not cough if I breathe too deep as I must for song. I can still play the keys. I can still write.

Archeology

I walk so barefoot
carefully among the sherds
on this ground, this back
yard. I know you were
here, leaving your trace, your tears
and I know how hard
it will be to piece
it all back together. I
don't have the right glue.

August 31, 2009 1:25 PM

Not A Swan

Photo by Michel Rajkovic

"I honestly think it is better to be a failure at something you love than to be a success at something you hate." - George Burns

"Maybe I'm lucky to be going so slowly, because I may be going in the wrong direction." - Ashleigh Brilliant

"Sport and life is about losing. It's about understanding how to lose." - Lynn Davies

"Hope is itself a species of happiness, and perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords." - Samuel Johnson

It is important to think I could be a swan. It is equally important to know I am not a swan. I am not good for carrying heavy loads. I am unlikely to ever build a house. Hell, I have trouble staying awake in the afternoon commute. I guess I will never be qualified as a truck driver either. I am no mechanic and really don't care to cook or clean or do much of anything really. Oh yes, I write a pretty good poem and noodle around on keyboards of different kinds fairly well. So if swans can write poetry, then maybe I have a chance.

Not A Swan

If you came up on
me floating in the middle
of my small puddle
I would be scrambling
into the air, like some big
old ungainly bird,
definitely not
a swan.

August 31, 2009 12:56 PM

Too Far Away

Photographer mercand

Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible. - Hannah Arendt

You have to pay the price. You will find that everything in life exacts a price, and you will have to decide whether the price is worth the prize. - Sam Nunn

In life, many thoughts are born in the course of a moment, an hour, a day. Some are dreams, some visions. Often, we are unable to distinguish between them. To some, they are the same; however, not all dreams are visions. Much energy is lost in fanciful dreams that never bear fruit. But visions are messages from the Great Spirit, each for a different purpose in life. Consequently, one person's vision may not be that of another. To have a vision, one must be prepared to receive it, and when it comes, to accept it. Thus when these inner urges become reality, only then can visions be fulfilled. The spiritual side of life knows everyone's heart and who to trust. How could a vision ever be given to someone to harbor if that person could not be trusted to carry it out. The message is simple: commitment precedes vision. - High Eagle

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. (attributed) - Talmud

Too Far Away

I am not really
here but still I see you hold
us in new strange life,
hold life on your lap,
as if we had a child, born
of our loins, but no
I am not here, have
never been near enough to
even see your need
nor hope to fill it.

August 30, 2009 10:17 AM


Photographer: Unknown

The Painter

SNOW

It began to snow at midnight. And certainly
the kitchen is the best place to sit,
even the kitchen of the sleepless.
It's warm there, you cook yourself something, drink wine
and look out of the window at your friend eternity.
Why care whether birth and death are merely points
when life is not a straight line.
Why torment yourself eyeing the calendar
and wondering what is at stake.
Why confess you don't have the money
to buy Saskia shoes?
And why brag
that you suffer more than others.
If there were no silence here
the snow would have dreamed it up.
You are alone.
Spare the gestures. Nothing for show.
- Vladimir Holub
translated by Ian & Jarmila Milner

"You are standing in the sky. When we think of the sky, we tend to look up, but the sky actually begins at the earth. We walk through it, yell into it, rake leaves, wash the dog, and drive cars in it. We breathe it deep within us. With every breath, we inhale millions of molecules of sky, heat them briefly, and then exhale them back into the world." - Diane Ackerman



This poem is of course about Vincent. I have always felt an affinity. I am crazy enough in my own ways. I am fortunate that my madness has not haunted me like it did him. I can understand the sacrifice of the ear. I can understand how the world is so alien. These have been daily encounters for me. I began a journey to peace quite some time ago and I have largely succeeded but not entirely. My temper laspses and insanity returns. That is just how it is. I have things to face and just live with. My hope is to live transparently, and so I cannot keep secret behaviors of any consequence.

Vincent Van Gogh. I read a novel written by Sheramy Bundrick called Sunflowers, the story of Vincent told by his lover, a prostitute named Rachel. The story covered his time in Arles, where he painted intensely.

The Painter

To ache and burn so
that I would rip my own ear,
that I would turn night
into day on some
other planet with pinwheel
stars filling the sky.

Then to know this home
is askew, that you run from
it, from me. I howl.

August 29, 2009 8:36 PM

The Magician’s Wish

Bajo Aqua by Elena Dudina

Bajo Aqua means "under water" but there are rich under and overtones, and this is a poem of a title...a Spaniard might also think of a lowland or hollow, a shallow like a shoal or sandbank, in music bajo voz is a bass voice, or a bajo violoncelo is a low cello, and in idioms bajo figures in ground floor, underskirt, the cuff of pants, or a slum neighborhood. There is the idea of below in many forms, even a low or soft voice, or secretly, or with a voice low enough that it is almost a whisper, as we use undertone. It figures in thinking about under in many contexts, under contract, under oath, under lock and key, on parole, under penalty, under protest. All this figures in the Spanish, the cloud of connotation, water as metaphor tied to under in all contexts. Thus it is an expression of limit.

In the Western United States we know bajo in the feminine form, as in Baja California, Lower California

I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity. - Albert Einstein

We accumulate our opinions at an age when our understanding is at its weakest. - Georg C. Lichtenberg

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them. - Virginia Woolf

To get back my youth I would do anything in the world, except take exercise, get up early, or be respectable. - Oscar Wilde

I have turned 65 today, the official date of American old age, marked by strongly urged medicare enrollment. I could have refused but only at a punitive price. My social security base rate retirement age is 66. I will be as full time as possible for five more years. I am arranging my life as best I can to accomplish that. It is however a race against my health which shows real signs of faltering. These are my current limits.

There are always limits. Limits may vary from day to day or from context to context, but even improvisational musicians know, even atonal musicians, arhythmic musicians know there are certain ways you can and many ways you can't. So a man of power will still be forced to say, "if I had (sufficient) power."

There may be ways a person can say, "there are no limits." One sure way that is true is to say, "at God's pleasure and with His assistance, I can do anything He permits." Even then, there are conceivable changes that I cannot achieve because He will not ever permit those. Think on that one, think how God permitted Nazism to flourish for decades. Yet there are limits. This will ever be true, no matter how much creative power I amass.

The Magician’s Wish

If I had power
I would weave your new life path,
stud it with fortune
flashing in the light
left above us as the sun
sets in the true north
of this brand new world.
Sun rising in the south and
setting in the north,
how we know it worked.

August 29, 2009 7:30 PM