Imagined Woods

Looking through the sliding glass doors

I find myself 

across the street in a forest 

of old-growth oak and pine thick with green sleeves

surrounding apartment buildings,

having dodged bulldozers and aphids, 

as I have been spared, yet also mirrored

in sloughing eucalyptus bark 

and elbows of boughs bent 

toward a solar charge. I celebrate this lucky life 

with candles from the coral tree

and a canopy of tall fig trees swaying cheek to cheek 

while wondering how it is I have been granted

this Eden, this longevity of random turns. 

A controversy of crows is calling but not for me.

 

While Most Drink Coffee

To rev their engine and open their lids,

I have my own way of waking.

A ritual below consciousness

that caffeinates me.

Frozen berries blue, black and rasp

of a measureless number,

known only to my quick eyes,

half awake, dropped into a bowl followed by

just the optimal sprinkle of Bran Buds

and Catalina Crunch

(This is no laughing matter)

wet by a precise, random splash of almond milk.

Then comes the casual exactitude

of the spoonful, with a nod of approval

from my congenitally wise tongue,

sufficient to open my taste buds,

my hemispheres, my voltage

to set an equipoise to meet the day.  

An un-berried portion would be an insult

to my entire palate, would tilt my planet,

crumble my architecture, already teetering

and I might never know why.

This is the way it goes, unrehearsed, 

in the dailiness of a plan that is no plan,

a knowledge beyond knowing,

making my way in the juice and crunch

of existence with berries and grains 

in this enormous bowl.

Hills, Stairs and A Big Climb

My friend Judy R. is an ace photographer. What I merely glimpse she composes. Stairs at Disney Hall become an abstract of intersecting angles with increments of light and shade. What are stairs but a series of horizontals within a diagonal to reach the vertical? She is a poet without paper capturing creases in the landscape and on faces. Stairs are what humans do to hills and high rises.

Artists have to find their place, their perch. half in, half out of this world. As A.A. Milne put it…….Halfway up the stairs / Isn’t up / and Isn’t down / It isn’t in the nursery  / And it isn’t in town / All sorts of funny thoughts / Run round my head  / It isn’t really anywhere / It’s somewhere else instead.

We step, we climb like Jack and Jill or Bill and Hill to fetch our water. Sometimes we break our crowns but if the land is parched, there is a thirst for justice to be quenched.

Five hundred years ago Incas built a city on top of a hill in the Andes. This was far more than a hill of beans.  It takes 3,000 steps to reach the top. I’d hate to have made the descent and forgotten my car keys.  They might also have prevented invading pseudo-pious Conquistadors. However, by the time Spanish marauders arrived Machu Picchu was buried under dust and rubble. It wasn’t unearthed until 1911. 

High as it is, nothing compares to the figurative mountain we need to climb. Ever since Donald descended on his golden escalator into the netherworld, he has dragged the country through an abyss with the slime of his indecency and delusional apocalyptic fictions. 

The transcendence I look for in the arts has its corollary on the socio-political scene. There is a moral violence in the air and voters need to dispel that miasma with a gust of fresh air. Not to be above the fray but to elevate the fray to civil discourse. Whether we can lift ourselves from his degradation requires a buoyant spirit and new vision that taps into this country's highest potential, releasing the creative and innovative force of our diverse population. Out of the mud, a lotus.

A few years ago, the poet Ann Lauterbach wrote a book called On A Stair which she said could also be read as Honest Air. We need some of that honest air.

Mattering

I must have been no more than five years old because my legs didn’t reach the floor when I sat back in a large seat of the darkened Austin movie theater on a Saturday afternoon. Besides the double feature there was the March of Dimes collection box passed around, cartoons, a serial and RKO Pathe news. It was an immersive experience. In those days people entered at any time.

Now the place was pitch black. A large man groped his way along my aisle, his eyes still wide with the sun. He inched slowly, feeling for shoes anxious to find a seat with no legs in front of it. Stopping in front of mine he started to settle down on top of me.

What could I do to announce myself in this world, to avoid eradication? My defense to being crushed and erased was to make a joyful noise, to shake my Good & Plenty. A sound that I was good and there was plenty of me or at least enough to live another day.

It was like Dustin Hoffman as Ratso Rizzo yelling to the cars as he crossed a street in Manhattan, I’m walkin here, I’m walkin. It was my declaration of existence, I’m sitting here, I exist, I matter.

I've returned to this scene many times in my head but there is a missing person in the scenario I have never included before; my brother who, four years older, was my keeper. Many fleeting snapshots stay in the album of my memory in those early years, but I seem to have photo-shopped Arthur out of all of them.

In the solipsism of my childhood, he didn’t matter… but, of course, he did. Too late to make amends; he died 62 years ago yet that needs now to be at least stated. Arthur had a short and troubled life. I don’t think he ever knew he mattered. His death came on a mountain road with high alcohol content in his bloodstream.

One day as early teenagers we were left a couple of dollars to have dinner in a restaurant. Either my mother was in the hospital with a detached retina and my father was working or he was laid up with double pneumonia and she was working. I recall how uneasy my brother was as we sat at the local deli waiting to be served. He wasn’t sure anyone would see us and if they did would the waiter even take our order?

There were times along the way when mattering took the form of vanishing. One class in pharmacy college was taught by a Professor Aldstadt who tyrannized us with his Gestapo-like tactics. The subject was pharmaceutical chemistry. We had to memorize structural formulas of new products coming on the market. Typically, he would say, You, with the pimples on your face hiding behind Goldstein, get up to the blackboard and show us how stupid you are.  

My strategy was to disappear by wearing a beige shirt to class that I hoped would blend in with the seat. It worked but a far better way of mattering happened when a returning G.I. cornered the diminutive teacher, grabbed him by the collar and reminded him why we fought the war against fascism.

 

My friend likes to talk to people in restaurants....  waiters, busboys and parties at the next table. It's a way of breaking down barriers, of leveling. Here we are together in this absurdist tableau. Maybe the man clearing our table has a novel-in-progress under the seat of his car and the server is waiting for a call from a casting director. Everyone has a story to tell. We all matter.