Living a Documentary

The theater of absurd which passed as a presidential speech Tuesday evening was a political rally; a spectacle that disgraced the halls of Congress. It was a rhetorical equivalent of the January 6^th attempted overthrow of our democracy. A litany of lies, insults and arrogance that created a moral violence in the air. 

There was no legislative agenda put forth because he has virtually dismissed the legislature, already, in favor of a despot’s decree. In the maelstrom of his edicts, not a single act addressed the grievances of his constituency. 

Ninety-two years ago, Hitler and the Nazi Party gained control of their parliament and three weeks after that he was granted full dictatorial power. In the interim I was born. From my embryonic sea, I sensed unrest.

The residue of those early years, of swastikas, dust bowl, breadlines and President Roosevelt’s patrician voice were the givens for me the rest of that decade. I was suckled on movies, and this is where I came in. We are now living in the historical moment of a documentary.

Ten years ago, I believed that progress, however slow, was inherent as humankind evolved. Now, I need to be persuaded it isn’t cyclic. We seem to have landed back in time. Can it be that humans are eager to abdicate their autonomy and look for an authority figure to mindlessly follow? Is this a blip in the chronicle or a flaw in the genome?

Indeed, bullies have always been roaming the schoolyards and maybe even embezzled milk money, but I don’t recall a movement to elect them as class president. Or for the class liar insisting that he won after being defeated. What we all knew in 2^nd grade, half of us have forgotten as so-called grownups.

Will the story of the next few years pick up in Bavaria or Brooklyn? Shall we make the world grate again? Or can we remember not to run with scissors but learn to play well with others?

 

 

The Day Zelensky Got Sold Down The River

The hands on the clock ran counter-clockwise

We asserted our right to pillage and loot

For pieces of silver under their soil

Vito Corleone made an offer that got refused

The hungry bear gobbled the salmon

A kindergarten bully knocked over a kid's blocks

Churchill choked on his cigar

Attila the Hun got pardoned

A man at the beach kicked sand in someone's face

A slumlord evicted a family

Stalin, from his mausoleum, applauded

Ivan the Terrible seemed less terrible

A passenger abused the flight attendant because he can.

The U.S. invaded Grenada again.

A murder of crows executed a hummingbird

Walmart closed down Main St.

The oval office grew spikes

A piranha swallowed the goldfish

 

 

 

 

Pistachio Ice Cream Revisited

Imagine placing a jar on a hill in Tennessee as in the Wallace Stevens poem Anecdote of the Jar. The jar took dominion. It tamed the wilderness. The scene was decontextualized as the hill became a table.

A hill of pistachio ice cream changed the table in my eyes and transported me. Enter Proust. I love ice cream, all flavors except those with nuts in them such as butter pecan or pistachio. Or so I had thought. I must have decided that over eighty-five years ago. My seven-year-old self was not to be trusted with such a momentous decision.

Why do we dislike certain foods, I ask you? I suspect my head did not consult my palate. Associative thinking, perhaps. Maybe my shoelace broke at that moment, or I was upset over the war in the Pacific. More likely my older brother hid my tennis ball.

I still have an aversion to butter pecan. But a pecan is not a pistachio. Up to now I have lived my life pistachio deprived. It may explain all my fiscal blunders. Now that I’ve discovered the pinch of pistachio in the creamy green almond pasture, anything can happen.

Forget everything I said about pistachio.

Researching all this, I discovered that it may be the almond flavor that gets to me more than the pistachios. Almonds contain amygdalin which yields traces of cyanide when they are metabolized. I’d better watch out; I could be slowly committing suicide. I’ve always suspected a self-destructive streak. If the carbs don't get me, the amygdalin will.

Am I allowed to like pistachios in a bowl but not in ice cream? Conversely, I don't particularly like raisins but they're OK in rum-raisin ice cream. As Emerson said, Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

The thing about pistachio is that it’s the only flavor that rhymes with mustachio. That’s a fact even though life doesn’t seem to rhyme anymore except with strife.

There is enough strife in nature, as my friend Roger once told me, with most animals dying by tooth or claw. It’s not for us to tame it. If I should go to that hill in Tennessee with a jar of pistachio ice cream, it would be to create a transient collage of disparate objects and then I can go home and lick it. 

  

 

Glut and Sort

Every morning I'm greeted by a couple dozen emails from five news sources, four Substack voices, three poetry sites, puzzles, ads, arts, articles, opinions, assorted miscellany, pleas for money, and several hellos from friends.

As the day goes on, they stack up. The puppeteer in the sky knows us and saturates us reinforcing material.  

At least half of them go unopened but a glut is a glut as a gluttony in the gut. I just spoke to Jung, and he said there is no archetype for this condition. It’s a maelstrom for the psyche. So, what do we do? We sort.  

Back in the day, the Sunday paper had a classified section, real estate section, and separate sections for business, comics, sports, entertainment, book reviews and both local and international news along with ads for everything later gobbled up by Amazon. 

I took a secret pleasure in sorting; code for discarding most of it with the illusion that I had a grip on things. I also weighed six pounds less when I put it down.

Life has come down to sorting. If we don’t, we soon find ourselves out of sorts. I’m aware of no HMO which covers out of sorts. Given the glut of options at our fingertips we are called upon to manage our way through the clamor of a cluttered field. A glut of muck.

The Brits love the word sort. When the sleuth assures us all will be sorted out, it is the pivot of the plot. The suspects are soon to be assembled in the library. Sorting seems to be a synonym for solving, for setting things right, don’t you know? Such a bother! The range of sorting runs from a souffle rising while the soup is bubbling, to a guy double-booking his mistresses, to an axe murderer on the loose. It loses some teeth as it crosses the Atlantic.

Life has come down to sorting the glut. I squirm to think of it, but my blogs may be part of it. One man’s essay is another’s man’s glut.

 

Speak Tables, Speak

I think my earliest kitchen table was blue and it had a drawer holding utensils to slurp, stab and slice. The tools one needed to grow up. That table was the place for high-level policy decisions. My parents would settle world affairs as if on some summit. Of course, they pretty much agreed with themselves. When it came down to less lofty matters, like cursing Uncle Irving for God knows what or how to get Mr. Dalebrook to settle his outstanding bill after the drugstore went belly-up, what better place to plot strategies or reconcile differences.  

Oh yes, I suppose we ate there too.  I have fond memories of burnt liver and boiled chicken which I tried, in vain, to hide under the mashed potatoes. But then there was also my mother’s world class pot roast, and I shall leave with that whiff in my memory vault.

The Algonquin Round Table, or Vicious Circle, was comprised of NYC literati including Dorothy Parker who had a habit of committing suicide unsuccessfully, Robert Benchley, Jascha Heifetz (to my surprise), a loquacious Harpo Marx, the NY Times theater critic Alexander Woollcott, Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman to name-drop a few. It all started when a few members decided to surprise Woollcott by roasting him. It turned into a ten-year lunch. They were said to have viper-tongues and concealed stilettoes as they jabbed each other with taunts, barbs and gleefully mean wit. It was the post WWI roaring 20s, with a dozen speakeasies on every block in midtown Manhattan.  Gradually they drifted off to Hollywood or sobered up with the crash of 1929. The table outlasted them all. 

Speak tables, speak.

Going back in time to mid-18^th century England, Samuel Johnson sat with Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon and assorted luminaries around a table every week at Turk’s Head Tavern. James Boswell was there to record the pearls of wisdom dropping onto their plates and into their ale. The group was called The Club. One had to have a silver tongue to gain a seat at this table. I wonder if their waiters wondered if they’d put their money where their mouth was. In later years, Tennyson, Kipling, and Eliot made the cut but not Dickens, Trollope or Hardy.  Some tables don’t have a leg to stand on.

Johnson’s words were precise and mellifluous yet not ornamental. One could be happily reprimanded and save the insult under glass as Lord Chesterfield did. Perhaps the greatest export of imperialist England was language itself. It flowed around six continents leaving its mark of empire upon which the sun never set.

Then there would be the solitary figure sitting and ruminating on such petty matters as the meaning of life. That would be myself at a corner table in the Automat where I could introvert into my coffee and take communion with a Kaiser roll.

Now I sit with dear friends at a table commiserating over the thousand cuts into the entrails of our dear-departed country. A fly has found low-cost housing in my salad. The lettuce is undocumented. The music is a dirge, but we move the conversation from lamentation to exclamations of charged air and green remembered hills.

 

 

About Face

Is our face a map of where we’ve been? Does it register our journey from dread to radiance in the country of our eyes? My guess is that our wrinkles signify a continent of sorrow alongside a firmament of wonder. My creases are on-ramps and off-ramps where I've dared and where I haven't, like a hung jury carrying both innocence and guilt.

Mouths can sneer, foreheads can frown and eyes can laugh, even noses; I’m told mine flare when I’m telling a joke. I wouldn’t know. I seldom look at myself. I’m not even sure I’d recognize me if I ran into myself in a crowded elevator.           

The full spectrum is there but not always decipherable. Yet some people, apparently, can probe our past and intuit our future as they decipher the nuances of our facial terrain.

It got me thinking how my face at age five has grown over decades to this one I’m wearing now. Was the guy in the mirror always there in waiting or has my thrill-a-minute chronicle shaped it? If I had been born in squalor and fallen in with a band of mercenaries, would I have the same look? I would hope that my lucky life of passion and compassion has found a home in this landscape of a face.

Some of us like Redford or Newman keep the same face for a lifetime. Others like Pacino or Brando morph as if there was always another Al and Marlon waiting to emerge. A friend once remarked that she had married Roddy McDowell and ended up with James Gandolfini.

Our nose always lands in the middle of our face to make for magnificent symmetry, yet the possibilities seem infinite. Siblings and cousins come close but are not indistinguishable. Maybe there’s a guy in Bulgaria who is my double and we're each other's generic equivalent. That’s the sort of stuff of which trashy novels are written and even trashier blogs. 

Valentine's Day

February 14^th is a holy day. There’s nothing more sacred than love, being met, where we can discover our full selves. Who is to be more revered than the person who can received us and be received.

Love is the opposite of death. The way compassion is the antithesis of dispassion, callous indifference. Now more than ever, love is our stay against hatred and oppression. Even when we rage against the dying of the light we do so in the name of love. Love is what is missing in a room of nefarious schemers.

I can imagine that someone, early on, profoundly unloved Donald and his wound is now ours. Against all the avarice and loathing let loose in the scramble for power and domination let this Valentine’s Day be our filibuster against the madness of our country, our stay halting the moral violence in the common air. 

Love expressed is risky. The designated day has to overcome the ridicule of cynics along with the usual monetizing by merchants of roses and chocolates. Then there are the recycled verses of Hallmark cards all of which tend to degrade true affection.

But I say, let it be, all of it. The flowers and the candy, even the bad poetry. We live with a paucity of language for love. It is far easier to write a poem of vehemence and dread than one from the loving heart. Love eludes what is sayable.

Life is an astonishment and warrants an astonishing embrace and exclamation. Love is, of course, more about being than saying yet we get revitalized in trying to find the words. I can't carry a tune, but I sing anyway. Let it be celebrated today and renewed every day thereafter.

Life As A Movie

I thought it was my movie, this one I’m in, as the aw shucks / gulp, good guy who discovers the cure for all that ails us / negotiating a peace among tribes / the one where I’m improvising on tenor sax /dancing on walls / singing duets with my leading lady.... oops, wrong movie.

For now, I’m just a second banana, better than an extra, but still just a minor bit player bearing witness to the debacle, not the sheriff leading a posse but the guy who ducked in the barroom brawl while the card sharp and cattle rustler took over the town and headed out to the hanging tree.

But wait, we are all stars in our own movie. Here I am now in the Resistance, posing as a ninety-two-year-old retired pharmacist by day but an urban guerilla in the Underground by night sending coded messages in dusted frappuccinos or embedded in everything bagels. Who knows the moles in Musk’s closet? I’ll never tell.

The third act is being written on the fly. The lynch mob will be met by the heartland which finally gets the serious joke on them. Dissent breaks out. The first ones now are soon to be last. Joe the Plumber will get the word that he’s gone from a New Deal to a Fair Deal to a Raw Deal. It is my movie again.

For the gangsters in the palace, the jigs up. Lay down your algorithms, the citadel is surrounded, come out with your hands up.  The carefully scripted rampage of chaos has been exposed as the funeral of our country. Not a single edict issued addresses the lot of the aggrieved. MAGA gripes will become mega-grief as they see they've been thrown under the bus.... until a lightbulb goes on over their collective heads.

Poets will legislate. (Men have been dying for lack of it.) People will migrate as they always have. I’ll have written my own letter of transit. I am shouting on the rooftops of my keyboard.

Before the credits roll, there are flashbacks to those early years when I had all the answers in my back pocket. Simplistic truth had me in the dark till I let in question marks. The musical score modulates between doubt and exclamation points. The camera finds me in close-ups, the soft skin inside my fist, open head, open heart. The camera doesn't lie.

Potato Thoughts

 The potato is a tragic vegetable. In 1992 Dan Quayle couldn’t spell it and lost the election. In today’s dumbed-down America his ignorance would have been enough to sweep him into office.

The church at first denounced the tuber since it was not mentioned in the Bible. Makes sense to me. I doubt if sweet potato fries or potato latkes were mentioned either and now I’m getting hungry. It’s too bad, news of their condemnation didn’t reach Ireland in time for the blight of 1845-1850 which wiped out a third of their population, half through death and the rest by emigration to supply the Boston and New York City police force.

At first potatoes were scorned in Europe because they looked misshapen like leprous limbs and therefore must be the source of leprosy. A brilliant piece of illogic which might also have concluded that eating carrots and celery would lead to a tall and lanky population.

More likely, too many potatoes could hasten the onset of diabetes. They are high in carbohydrates but otherwise quite nutritional. At least they sustained the down-trodden during a century of the Industrial Revolution, but barely. They grow in soil otherwise nonarable which describes the land tilled by the peasantry. 

The region around Chile and Peru bequeathed potatoes to the world. Remains have been found which date back twelve thousand years. Spanish Conquistadors, obsessed with gold, had to settle for sweet potatoes. China, of all places, produces more of them now than any country. French fries must be America’s revenge to the Chinese who are becoming a fast food nation thanks to McDonald's and KFC. Leon Trotsky, who seemed always to be on the wrong side of history, thought it could feed Mother Russia but Lenin decreed there be all that wheat and no potatoes so now they drink it as the Mother of all Vodka.

Mash it or hash it, bake it or pancake it. Soup it, stew it or scallop it. The Pomme de terre, being of the earth for earthlings, is well-named by the French. The English boiled theirs which may account for the fall of the British Empire.

Potatoes can change lives. When the actress, Doris Roberts, was in kindergarten she had one line in a play. She said, I am Patrick Potato and this my cousin, Mrs. Tomato. She heard laughter and decided to be on the stage from that moment on. Kids learn to count, one potato, two potato, three potato, four. When they grow up they will join a nation of couch potatoes munching on chips that we can’t eat one of.

My mother was famous in our family for her lumpy mashed potatoes; it was a perfect complement to burnt liver. As a result I had a fondness for potato salad. An early memory of potatoes occurred watching old war movies when a soldier was given K.P. as punishment. The next scene saw him peeling spuds.

One of my first poems depicted an imagined scene of my grandfather, as a boy, hiding from the Cossacks in a cellar and finding his way across the ocean on the rhizome of a potato. Indeed great migrations might be attributed to the wings of the tuber.

John Reader, in his book, Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent, argues that this ubiquitous vegetable played a major role in the rise of both Western civilization and the current Chinese ascendancy, mostly by keeping the multitude’s bellies full and their tolerance for poverty high; and that’s no small potatoes.

Perhaps life, as it is lived, is a series of small potatoes. As Alan Watts put it, Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.

Super Bowl Sunday

It happens every year at this time. Two teams in their colored underwear will pretend to clash, brutally, and we will pretend to care as we stuff our faces with planets of pizza, guacamole and beer. We gather together on Super Bowl Sunday in a debased form of Thanksgiving.

Think of the camaraderie of eleven men huddling in brotherhood on the field while 120 million Americans commune, both brainy and brainless, putting aside our IQs, such as they may be, and slip on our fangs for a few hours.

For one afternoon. fandom triumphs over factions. Unless Donald takes the occasion to annex Greenland, MAGA and un-MAGA will redirect their animus to the gladiators on the field. The antics of the regime will give way to the theater of two football teams.

What we witness is a human drama unfolding, unrehearsed and unrigged. No one will be moving the goalposts. It cannot be hacked by Putin or the Chinese, nor lied about on Truth Social. Nor can the outcome be overturned by some archaic electoral contrivance. Perhaps it is the rules of the game we yearn for.

It is hoped that the snarls will be left on the couch, and our aggression might be sublimated for a while. Dare I say, mercy might even be tapped into? 

An estimated 1.4 billion dollars will be wagered, enough to rebuild Gaza or send Elon into orbit. We will bet on the outcome, whether the total points scored are even or odd, on the coin toss and even the length of the national anthem.

Football is a reenactment of WWI where trench warfare was measured in yards gained as the combatants were carried away in stretchers. To reduce the carnage of war to an entertainment of contained violence is both a way of exorcising hostility and legitimizing it. Yet, for aficionados, it is a game of strategy and finesse. The players are merely pawns in the coach’s chess game.

Clearly football games are not everyone's cuppa. For those non-observant of this national holiday, it may be the perfect time to caulk your bathtub or take advantage of empty freeways, parks and noiseless restaurants.

Yes, the hoopla around the pre-game is disproportionately self-important, faintly militaristic and super patriotic. The halftime show has my finger on the mute button. All of it is indefensible yet there are times when we, en masse, are encouraged to confront the mystery of life where rationality doesn't reach. Rituals, such as this, answer that call. 

 

 

Two Old Poems

Rectangles and Howls

 

The plan for a hike in Sycamore Canyon

became a picnic on a bench at La Brea Tar Pits

Urban bucolic, I’m thinking

as we share a submarine sandwich

while a crane lifts a mastodon

from a river of primordial ooze

running deep under Wilshire Blvd.

where saber-toothed felines

are caught in claw and snarl

under the subterranean parking lots

of insurance companies.

The black cauldron bubbles

of prehistory in our nostrils

and my old brain almost remembers

the happy accidents it took to survive.

How it has all come to this:

A paved swamp with rectangles gone wild

on a street of museums, hung dreams and howls.
__________________________________

Out of Suburbia

 

I have come from abandoned streets

and serious lawns, from rooms of deep pile

thinking perpendiculars.

In the mall, a collusion of displays,

among the well-fed hungry.

The palm tree brought to live under skylight

hasn’t enough arms for me.

The orange grove is paved over

by on-ramps and off-ramps.

 

I return to search the manicured wreckage

for the man who sleeps in my body.

Listen, a sound beats beneath cut roots.

Nests grow in the metal tree on each roof

and a controversy of birds stirs the air.

Counter Narrative

So much is being written about the reckless edicts issuing out of our newly crowned monarch I have nothing more to add. The usurpation of Congressional power by the executive, without regard for human toll is well underway. Shock and awe were the stated goals, and the reign of terror is proceeding as planned. The cycle of history has us reenacting Germany circa 1933.

High culture offered much to cocoon Bavarians and Berliners. I now know the feeling. Being more middlebrow, I look to movies as a source of transport along with the restorative power of poetry and literature. Choose your artform. Any enrichment and enlightenment become a counter narrative to the menace we have let loose. Against the requiem there is heard an ode.

An art experience is not passive. It must be met with a reception that recharges our inherent creativity. At the bottom of this interchange is love, in all its permutations; that which nourishes the human heart. Now more than ever before is the time to bond and support each other.

For me, love releases a certain energy, a permission to risk and to forgive. It is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower. Love is the juice against which the despot withers.

Embodying the potency of that otherwise unnamable goodness is the poetic prose of Niall Williams. In his recent book, Time of the Child, he creates and immerses us into a world both real and yet of another realm, which is to say, the extraordinary ordinary. He risks schmaltz but never crosses over. He dares to be enchanting.

To bear witness to the dissolution of our former democracy, today, I count on the written word. Tomorrow it may be a film or some other visual lift. Every day it is the joining of kindred souls.

 

 

Nostalgic for Platitudes

I’m getting nostalgic for those well-worn phrases such as Liberty and justice for all or all men are created equal. Suddenly these phrases are absent from public discourse in our new regime. Even the oath of the Boy Scouts of America might be deemed radical when it lists helping others as character building.

Four score and seven years ago it was 1938 and we were on the eve of a great war to test whether the precepts of our founders would long endure. We might ask the same question today. And remind me, Mr. President, why did we fight WWII?    

I am feeling gratitude for our platitudes. Their omission resounds, loudly. Here is an excerpt from George Bush’s inaugural speech in 2001.

Every immigrant, by embracing our ideals, makes our country more, not less, American. Today, we affirm a new commitment to live out our nation’s promise through civility, courage, compassion and character.

A civil society demands from each of us good will and respect, fair dealing and forgiveness.

How outdated these words now seem. We have lost our bearings along with our spine. 

Not only has our language been debased and defiled but the thrust toward male domination has now been extended to support domination as a geopolitical blueprint. 

We used to hold these truths to be self-evident. Now we have even discarded the notion of truth. Somebody in high places must have been inspired by these instructional words.

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. So said Joseph Goebbels.

Is he to be our new Founding Father?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going To the Well

There’s an upheaval outside. A wolf at the door. The new regime feels like a terrible school play about some ancient regime. Ivan the Terrible meets Vlad the Impaler, or the day Sparta overtook Athens. The air is full of Zuck and Muck. 

I could rant or I could chant. I choose a silent chant, not to seethe but to drown the noise with memories and visions, a wordless montage of intimacies; that persistent light near midnight in Connemara or the chronicle embedded in driftwood off the Cambrian coast or that first exchange of gifts…roots of a ficus for the stump of a live oak with new life springing. Even a dirge contains notes to be moved around the mulberry bush. We all fell down and got up again.

My instinct is to go to the well, to fill up on those values which comprise our ethos, those simple acts rooted in any overlooked day that affirm our humanity.

I watched a movie from way back, available on Kanopy. In the Argentinian Brazilian film, Found Memories, seemingly little action takes place. Yet the sum of it could be an antidote to the breaking news that is breaking our hearts.

It is like a visual poem depicting a few people in a rural Brazilian town, with glacial pacing, transporting the viewer into the spatial and temporal life of the town folks. The indoor scenes, in particular, have the feel of stepping inside a painting by the Dutch masters. 

The setting is a town occupied by near-ghosts, elderly folks, who have forgotten how to die. The gate to the cemetery is locked. The village café owner says he is not unhappy enough to be dead. Their existence is simple, reverent and communal. Madalena, well on in years, is shown kneading the dough for bread each morning and carrying it in a basket along railroad tracks almost grown over from disuse. Part of the daily ritual is her insistence on arranging the loaves on the shelf of Antonio, the shop owner, followed by his immediate removal of the bread. The playful jockeying between the two closely resembles affection. He then makes coffee which they take outside with a roll. It has the feel of a secular communion, wine and wafer.

The town folk are clearly living in the past, holding fast to memories of their loves and regrets as if time has been halted. Madalena writes nightly letters saving her emotions for her dead husband. When a young photographer arrives, routines are hardly ruffled, so quietly is her presence registered. Almost imperceptibly she insinuates herself into Madalena’s household. At one point she remarks, I’ve never heard so much silence.

The aged Magdalena’s old photos seem to merge with the recent ones developed by the character of the young woman. Out of this linkage a conflation of the two worlds emerges as well as a bond between them. When the time comes, Rita, the young woman is asked to assume the baking of bread which has taken on a spiritual dimension. 

More impactful than the memories, are the rhythms of quotidian lives captured by the filmmaker. She reminds us of the small miracles beneath the surface of what first seems like withered lives. Let us not wither but revere our enduring verities and each other.

 

  

I Don't Know Why

There was an old lady who swallowed a fly
I don't know why she swallowed a fly - perhaps she'll die!

We are a nation that swallows a lot. We relish a promise no matter how foolish.

Eight years ago, we swallowed a fly and again today. I don’t know why we keep swallowing flies. For eight years he’s been buzzing around in our ears and our eyes and he’s in our brain besides.

Look how the Lord of the Flies frets and struts when he spouts, and he flaunts. A few others have swallowed this fly…  millions have swallowed his lies. We’ve never seen an Ego and Id of such abnormal size.

He takes to his Oval and bequeaths it to Elmer Gantry, Archie Bunker and Citizen Kane. This is the fly over the mango, the one that ate Chicago. The hocus-pocus that infests us like locusts.

I don’t know why this nation keeps swallowing flies. When the fly hasn’t reached its demise, we swallow a spider that wriggles and jiggles and tickles inside. Then we swallow a bird, how absurd, in order to swallow the spider. Maybe we will swallow a swallow. The purple Rust Belt swallowed a goat; they just opened their throat, then they swallowed a horse. They will die of course.

We have swallowed his slurs and rants, his boasts and blather. We don’t know if he is delusional, depraved or deranged. He was born in a rancid hive of superlative flies. He’s that fly in the soup, now on the wall. Where is the flypaper to catch him in freefall?

Don’t you think it is time to turn away? Yes, doctor, but this is the fly my swatter can’t reach. He hovers over the bowl poisoning the fruits of our labor, our amber waves of grain. Yet if we snuff him and rebuff him, perhaps we won’t die.

 

Well-Remembered Rain

I’m thinking rain. A gentle wetness much needed here, like fine lines in a Hiroshige woodcut, umbrellas opening like wildflowers. A drizzle, not a deluge like that afternoon in Delft with the ghost of Vermeer, catching the glisten on a rooftop. There is a drop congealed on a tulip; the same one he captured as a pearl earring.

Rain sufficient to extinguish embers, to quench a parched brushland. Let the topsoil slurp, not drench, nothing torrential to create mud rivers. Save the heavy downpour for the Sierras, turned to flakes. Turned to drifts. Let snow fall on cedar like petals shook loose from cherry trees. Bring on the northern blizzards and give it four months to melt filling our spigots and hydrants, to irrigate the almonds and grapes.

I’m remembering the rain in Albany, relentless in sheets, how Peggy and I sloshed our way into a restaurant, sat by the fire celebrating our willingness to be lucky and how we ended each other’s drought.

How it rained in that seaside town in France we’ll never forget whose name we could never remember. We watched from our window the Atlantic churning against rocks going to pebbles. In the aftermath we walked under a wheel of gulls and a carbonated night sky. Waves found their own insistent music. We took that rhythm inside, going from Beethoven’s 5th to a Chopin adagio.

Precipitation in movies ranges from dark and stormy nights to that other cliché of funereal showers, black suits, black sky. Steady rain with a jazzy sax sets the mood in shadowy noir films. The goon is across the street holding up the lamp post. Everything is going against the guy in the trench coat including the elements. Then there is the rain of renewal, a secular baptismal washing away that old, crusted version and a new self, emerges. My wish is for the joy of rain as if drinking it; Gene Kelly prancing in puddles with his partner, that umbrella, iconically singing his heart out.

 

Poem From the Ashes

Gaza in the Palisades

Leveled to sameness

Millions as kindling

Firestorms as if…

No shield for embers

Acres vacant, evacuated

What money can’t buy

Hydrants drip by the sea

Walls between gone

Gone to gusts uncontained

No home, no homeland

From desert to the sea

Cease fire cease

An occasion to gather

To share worldly goods

To wake to what is.

 

 

 

 

By Heart

Such a soulful phrase. Too bad we used it up only for memorization. Not to say that poems or Shakespearean passages aren’t worth reciting. Oral renditions are increasingly rare these days, except in theatrical performance. We have ceded memory to the click of a link if we want to listen to words of wisdom or the music of poetry.  

By heart. It should be more than a habitat for deathless prose. It confirms the heart's status as a lonely hunter. So many acts of kindness and caring are done with and by our hearts. What we give with our full heart is returned to fill our heart. Reaching out to our fellow fire victims opens our own hearts.

My college experience was largely a matter of memorizing structural formulas and botanical origins. I would have much preferred the Canterbury Tales in Middle English or a passage from the Bard. All that rote education was a colossal waste except, perhaps, to exercise my head, not my heart.

My dear friend, Frank Dwyer, is a compendium of Shakespearean soliloquies and lyrical poetry. The lines flow like an inexhaustible underground spring, a muscle most of us have allowed to atrophy.

The art of committing passages to memory began to decline with Gutenberg’s printing press. Safe to say nobody knew their phone number in the 15^th century.

In preliterate times oral storage and transmission were our social media and about as reliable as Fox News. Hard to imagine Sean Hannity as a troubadour. No wonder the library at Alexandria was burned.

There is a ratio to our sensorium. Literacy has taken its toll on acoustic space. When the visual is extended we diminish the auditory. Thankfully there are folks like Frank to recite the best words in the best order; and they also make great dinner guests with seventeen syllables of haiku between courses and a sonnet sorbet for dessert.

When words come from the heart their provenance is unimpeachable. They not only play chamber music but are a repository of all we have let in, by heart.  

 

Great Thoughts

I can’t take your call right now; I’m busy thinking great thoughts. They’re so great they don’t fit inside my head. I got it; I got.; I don’t got it. Great thoughts are slippery, too slick to attach themselves. No Velcro. When they appear as a glimpse and vanish in a puff, I should know they were undeliverable, not for my eyes, not in this tide. There goes another one, something epochal, gone.

Great thoughts are to be discovered, not received. If you meet the Buddha, or a guru or your all-knowing father on the road, kill him. Not as a homicide, just ignore him to death.

Yet, I reach for the beyond. It's a bad habit. An impulse for threads. If I am fixed on a bowl, I admire its shape or shapelessness, the aperture, the walls, clay transformed, wood with burls, a vessel like hands make, flawed like humans. The tiny hole at the bottom not to offend the gods. The imperfection, the way every poem fails.  Words, merely.            

Sherlock reached. He knew the tobacco smoked in the Cappadocia region of Turkey matched the whiff of the suspect … given Basil Rathbone’s considerable nose to say nothing of the Orient Express which arrived at Hammersmith Station in time for Moriarity to take the stage to Baskerville releasing the hounds. The game was afoot, and he would set the world right. Elementary, he declared, deductively.

He took the big idea and wrestled it to the mat. Or you can start with the word scoop as in ice cream, or the investigative story that would move a cub reporter to the newsroom, to the editorial staff, to praline fudge ripple, to breaking news, a thirty-minute slot on as a pundit on Sunday morning cable and a three-book deal. It all makes sense as inductive logic. This, therefore, that.

Inductively, we can presume that the good guys should have won the Spanish Civil War against the four insurgent generals since we had the best songs.  Cherry-picking can turn a pie in the sky to a pie in the face.

Can it be that the down-trodden masses would cast their lot for the man most likely to throw them under the bus and grind them into his own off-ramp? Magnificent thoughts are born of small stuff but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, a promise is made of hot air and the emperor’s clothes are at the all-night laundromat in the spin cycle.

Here's Looking At You

Backward and forward gazes the Janus Head. Looking at both sides now. Giving birth to the month, January.

Remembrance of Things Past. Through a Glass Darkly.  Goodbye / Hello. I don’t know why you say goodbye; I say hello. G’day, What’s up? Good morning sun. The start of something big.

It’s a Wonderful World when you take Ovid out of Covid, the pox out of MAGA's vox populi. Looking for the Yes in yesterday, easier than locating the fun in dysfunction or the word in sword but here’s my calendar with all those empty squares, life-to-be, filled with cups of kindness yet for Miracles on 34th Street and Auld Lang Syne:

And there’s a hand, my trusty fere / and gie’s a hand o’ thine!........ And we’ll take a right gude-willie waught / For auld lang syne.

It makes good sense when you bend an elbow and down a few pints with mates.

Have I arrived where I began, knowing the place for the first time? There’s no arrival, I am just on my way but noticing the overlooked and listening past rhetorical chatter. The magnificent canvas outside my window astonishes my senses. Loving friends seed creativity. It is all a gift and for that I am grateful and feel a rush of reverence, an intimacy with the unknown.

I’ll be a year older this year than I was yesterday, so says the calendar of my bones. Even in this digital age, as the big clock spins, there is a child alive in my marrow. While tempus may fugit, another measure of time can stop on command, responsive only to our exuberance for life and alignment with the pulse of music in the spheres.

As Robert Bly put it in bis poem, Wanting To Steal Time………….

Every noon as the clock hands arrive at twelve, / I want to tie the two arms together, / And walk out of the bank carrying time in bags.