That Old Divide

Here we are living through the epilogue of the Civil War. The simmering embers of that conflict were never doused, never confronted and never resolved. Slavery was replaced by a virulent racism, lynchings, segregation and a persistent sickness in the soul of America. Even antebellum misogyny is having a revival.

Now, that inhumanity has been rekindled. The hoods of the Klan have been replaced by the masks of ICE agents. A mindless nativism is sweeping the country against people of color.

The degradation of human bondage which served to divide the underclass in 1860 continues today with misdirection of the aggrieved masses to vent their loathing against asylum-seekers. The malice of the administration toward immigrants serves the MAGA constituency not one bit.

There have been 16,000 books written about Lincoln and that war between the states. I’m currently reading two of them. Michael Shaara’s 1975 book, The Killer Angels is considered a classic as it profiles some of the officer combatants and brings them to life on the page. Particularly fascinating are their blunders, their arrogance and in one instance how the southern general, James Longstreet, saw the light in the aftermath and espoused the northern cause.

The other book I started I am unlikely to finish, since it is 725 pages. I was startled to learn that Jefferson Davis's wife, Verina, was opposed to slavery and regarded by some in the Confederacy, as being mulatto or creole. When Davis was jailed for two years after the Union victory, Varina moved to NYC where she worked as a columnist for Joseph Pulitzer’s newspaper, The New York World. It was Pulitzer who got Davis out of prison.

This book is called Lincoln vs Davis by Nigel Hamilton. Much is made about these two men and their wives. If Davis’s wife had abolitionist sympathies, Mary Todd Lincoln had siblings fighting for the Confederate cause.

We may have forgotten how families were ripped apart not unlike today. However, since the MAGA control of the federal government. the matter of state’s rights is now reversed. Instead of importing human labor in chains, we are exporting millions of laborers in shackles. Working people of the old Confederate states are once more being misled by the old fallen angels well-practiced in moral vacuity.

 

Two Kinds of Fathers

In the early 1970s I attended a Jim Jones rally in San Francisco. The followers addressed him as Father or Dad which is what he demanded. That People’s Temple cult took the lives of the two teenage children of my friends. A tragic ending for a couple who sought an alternative life. Amazing to me how some people willingly abdicate their autonomy, their selfhood, their decision-making to an authoritarian leader as if being an informed and discerning adult is too much for them.

I would suggest that this transfer of self is a form of regression. Daddy, the reigning patriarch, will decide what is right and what is true. Dying begins when doubt is forbidden. Take me, Father, Mr. President, Supreme Leader, Fuhrer. Tell me when to shout, what to wear, how to hate, whom to fear and to whom I am to swear fealty with unconditional obedience.

__________________

All the above describes who my father was not. He never raised his voice. If he got angry it showed in his eyes. He modeled a certain equanimity, a presence who listened and offered full reception. He seemed imperturbable and yet had strong principles. When the FBI came to the door, in the McCarthy era, asking for names he turned them away. His silence was his spine.

As a pharmacist, my father was accorded a position of authority. In those days the man who presided on a raised platform between globes of colored water was held in high esteem. He earned it by his deliberative temperament, his knowledge and the special assurance he generated to his clients.

Thankfully, I was the beneficiary of his fathering, his unconditional love. I hope to have continued further, father.

Celebrating The Succulent Round

Yes, of course, coins, and wheels and the lunatic moon but discs are risky, tires go flat, the moon is pocked and the three ring circus that rolls and roils us to despair are no match for the roly-poly, squishy peach or cherry berry and behold the apricot, the color of dawn and then there are plums to plumb before they turn to prunes and melons like volleyballs, or open the cantaloupe and watch the sun spill out and honey dew like dew that’s been honeyed as big as basketballs but don’t try dribbling, go ahead and open the watermelon and part that red sea, pits and all these ahead of summer’s lease, a ring-around-the rosy time, so take a bite of the plump and fuzzy peach, let it slurp, juice yourself Prufrock, let it drip and then you’ll hear the mermaids sing above the din of marines in our streets and if there is blood let it drip from those Satsuma plums; it’s all we have in this land of sticks and stones, parched of our precepts, going from grape to raisin.

 

The Fact Of the Matter

I’m a sucker for trivia. In fact, Ken Jennings, the host of the quiz show Jeopardy wrote a fine piece in the N.Y. Times reminding us that the word trivia used to mean the three basic courses taught 600 years ago, grammar, rhetoric and logic. The word itself has been trivialized.

Facts have taken a big hit from the MAGA mind ever since so-called alternative truths were introduced in 2016. And that’s a fact. They have made deceit a virtue.

Here are some tidbits I’ve recently come across which have found their way into my memory bank. Now I have to casually work them into a conversation.

I tried that the other day with the startling fact that three of our last five POTUS were born within six weeks of each other, Clinton, Bush and Trump, in the summer of 1946. Could it be that Mercury was in retrograde, or maybe nuclear fallout radiated the air?

How can I ever move a conversation to lead into the stat that only 17% of roads in this country were paved by 1935. The other 83% were gravelly or dirt. And that includes Easy Street and the Road to Riches.

The other day I learned there’s no such bird as a seagull. They are just gulls. Just as sardines don’t really exist but can be herring or many other short fish under six inches. I don’t know what to do with this info.

It is also true that the violin was saved from extinction by Catherine de Medici, Queen of France in the 16^th century. The instrument was first deemed by the Church to be licentious, too screechy and for scandalous dancing. Maybe they felt its sound resembled the seagull which doesn’t exist.

Here’s another scrap of knowledge to drop at a dinner party: ten million trees are felled annually just to manufacture toilet paper even though 70% of the world population does not use it. On second thought, better save this for another occasion and try the violin material for the party if you want to get re-invited.

Blame the Internet for all this. Folks before the millennium didn’t have the cargo we have to sort out. Has it elasticized our brain or must we forget something to make room for each new fact? I wonder what Google has to say about that.

Now, of course, we don’t need to spell, multiply or memorize anything. It’s all there waiting to feel the call of the click. I’m beginning to feel bad for my remembering brain. It may become vestigial and slough off. All that’s left for us is to never forget our Social Security number, pin and passwords and even those essentials are already well-known to hackers and to DOGE.

Why do we remember what we do? I knew the answer to this but I forgot. If I could only un-remember our current presidency I might live happily ever after. I’d even gladly delete all I just learned about gulls, sardines and violins and focus on the meaning of life. I swear I was on the verge of unlocking that mystery but it just slipped away.

 

The Autobiography of My Name

There we are fresh from that embryonic sea with no say in the matter and they name us.

Am I my name?  Yes, I must own it. No, I also disown it.

Norman contains No and Nor which I accept as a card-carrying contrarian. Sometimes I don’t disagree so much as I want more, of which I can claim 3 letters. Other times I don't even agree with myself.

I shiver and shun when I hear Normal. In my college days the word normal caused a brief panic. The term was often used in chemistry to describe a certain molecular state of solutions or a string of carbon atoms. I always thought I was being called upon with that first syllable.

There is also a yes/no in the common usage of the word normal. Early on, I probably wanted to be normal even though I knew I was dropped to earth by a spaceship. The word seemed elusive, and I doubt I was ever admitted, thankfully, into the normalcy club. Somewhere along the way abnormalcy seemed a better fit. 

Whether I am or not is relative. Too bourgeois for punk rock, too much otherness for any prescribed behavior. Being odd is being individuated. On the spectrum between Norman Rockwell and Norman Mailer? Maybe but I only know I am who I am and I ain't who I ain't. *

And then there’s the heritage of my name. I owe it to those warriors from Denmark and Norway who settled in Northern France and then saw no reason not to invade England in 1066. William the Conqueror crossed the channel with ten thousand of his closest friends. Hence the Norman Conquest which joined the romance language with the Saxon.

Though my nominal ancestors were Norsemen, fierce, bellicose, plunderers. (everyone needs a hobby), those traits are missing from my double helix. The last thing I plundered was my piggybank 85 years ago and my most recent conquest was a poke salad with some fresh tuna.

My guess is that my name was chosen by my parents as a way of disidentifying with the so-called Old World of Eastern Europe driven by the urge toward assimilation. It was to be nothing biblical. No matter what I may think of Norman, it's better than Nebuchadnezzar.

I’ve come to embrace my name as I’ve grown fond of myself, even as I stumble and bumble along. I just noticed that my name is embedded in the word enormous. It must be from the milk of kindness which flows, by the quart, in every vein. **

* John Prine

** Alan Jay Lerner 

 

Midnight Riffs In The Long Night City (From the Archives)

The high-rise office building with random lights for the cleaning crew looks like a computer board from a distance. And here's an all-night laundromat. Great place for co-conspirators to meet during the spin cycle with plans for a revolution. If you came to launder money, your limo made a wrong turn. Lester Young on sax.

This may be where John Le Carre did his best writing. Insomniacs congregate and bore each to sleep or watch single socks slither out the door…and then show up in a yard sale next month.  Thelonius Monk. 

Those round windows remind me of early television screens by Philco or Zenith. Who does their laundry in these wee hours? Maybe folks on their way to early Mass or nurses coming home on the graveyard shift. John Coltrane. 

Dog-walkers on the verge of finding the meaning of life and dogs answering the moon. Shut-ins thinking great thoughts. Who is that painter outside the Nighthawk Cafe? ...and is that you Vincent releasing stars onto your canvas? Miles Davis.

Some guy just spilled ketchup on himself eating at a 24 hour diner. I don’t see any diners anymore with the We Never Close sign but they must be out there at truck stops. Eighty-six on the egg salad. I can smell the java perc-ing and hear Sinatra singing, Strangers In the Night. his phrases making stanzas of the nocturnal air.

CVS pharmacies with their lights on in this city that wishes it could sleep for shoppers who hate crowds or suddenly wake up in a panic because they ran out of Q-Tips. There's the pharmacist on the night shift left all the routine paperwork by the crew working days. Frederic Chopin.

I was a night-prowler once or twice cramming for final exams in college. With two friends I rode the subway through the wee hours to stay awake, tunneling under the boroughs with structural formulas in my head or botanical origins for a course called Materia Medica. Our brains stuffed with a glossary of Latin names, from rhizomes and roots to the inner rind of fruits. Facts as dead as those stars in the firmament with not the slightest relevance to my life as a pharmacist. Just an exercise in rote learning to prepare us to drop a name at some cocktail party that never happened. Gilbert and Sullivan.

At the midnight hour, white sheets from the laundromat float over to the pharmacy like ghosts of alchemical ancestors over a smoky cauldron to do their sorcery in the dark shadows of a CVS inner sanctum. This is the hour of miracle healings and spontaneous remissions. Igor Stravinsky.

Around 3 A.M. millions of fellow seniors bumbling our way into bathrooms lit by night lights to empty our bladders. It's getting easier to not think. Now let’s see if we can inch our way back to bed, perchance to dream. Handel's Water Music.

Unstill

A distant desert sirocco wind

reaches me as a breath barely felt

yet something in me stirs.

What seems at rest is movement unrecorded.

My heart pumps like a hummingbird

hard at work to stay still, while

kidneys filter, pancreas secretes,

skin sloughs, organs conspire, some wither

yet stay juiced in this grand commotion.

 

Maps, too, look settled with colors fixed

yet a mistral has shifted tectonic plates

under the halls in Washington.

There is a stench from the wreckage

and carnage trembles the body politic,

fertilizes a seismic rage

from the debris of bogus vows

and hollow slogans that do not buy eggs,

cure measles, or open factories.

Sores fester and simmer

under the dome and the oval.

The quake may not yet register on the Richter

but tremors can be felt in my bones.

Clocks

In more ways than one we are off the clock. We have been out of time long before Salvatore Dali melted that watch in his 1931 painting. Climatologists have been warning our deaf ears of impending doom for decades. Time and tide are tired of waiting. 

Clocks don’t tick anymore. Many have lost their limbs. A generation has been raised without knowing what counterclockwise means. Wrists are going unadorned in favor of genius-phones. There is nothing to wind in the digital age.  Remember how we learned how to tell time? I don’t either but I think I regarded it as a milestone.

The notion of clocks came as an imposition on the natural rhythm of human existence. Eating, sleeping, and working all yielded to the tyranny of the clock as if to an alarm. Being punctual became a virtue. Pre-literate societies had no such need to punctuate their lives. 

When Big Ben strikes on the hour, all fourteen tons of it, you’d better check your timepiece and hurry up or else. The great London clock came at the height of the British Empire upon which the sun never set. It was the symbol of uniformity and authoritarian rule. In a culture of domination, everyone knows their place and when tea is served, one lump or two.

Harold Lloyd hung for his life on the big hand in one of the most enduring images of the silent film era as if to mock time itself. Orson Welles had his licks in a moment of levity during the zither filled Third Man movie when he ridiculed the Swiss for their neutrality and cuckoo clock as their sole contribution to Western Civilization. In fact, everything in that memorable speech was about as accurate as a broken clock.

Mrs. Dalloway, in Virginia Woolf’s classic novel, measured her life by the gongs of Big Ben. But her noon was altogether different from the other character’s twelve o’clock. Woolf's use of time was a way of giving relativity its due and give voice to the inner lives of her characters. In her masterpiece, time is subjective; for some an occasion for buying flowers or accepting a lunch invitation; for another a time for dying.

The clock gives us the illusion of quantifying our lives just as commodification monetizes it. It provides us with the idea of our existence being a chronology. World War I shattered this sequential narrative. The myth of progress was laid to rest along with millions of dead bodies to fertilize the fields of Europe. 

I wonder how many were killed just waiting for the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. A generation was lost, and survivors were also lost in the stupidity of it all, a life left in fragments and the dread of a world without God to write the fable.

In fact, life comes at us with simultaneity. Ideas, images, information and impulses in fragments we've learned to make into a coherent whole. Time hangs heavy one moment and the next we run out of time. Perhaps time is not of the essence, at least, according to the clock or watch. 

To each his own clock. If we listen hard enough, we might even hear it toc.

Writing While Watching

The thing I love about baseball is what most people don’t like. Too damn slow! But how else could I write a blog while watching? Poets need their space to roam, their outfield grass. The batter steps out of the box, calls for time, knocks at the dirt, that isn’t there, from his spikes. The poet takes out the comma he put in ten minutes ago. He is looking for a startling phrase, a fat fastball down the middle but instead he’ll take a walk.

Slow is under-rated. It is why time-lapse photography was invented. Give the game its due. If you want action turn on the basketball game. I’ve been ignoring the season the way I have no taste for fast food. Eating a taco on the run doesn’t stand a chance next to high tea.

Yet here I am watching the last two minutes of the Laker game which can take half an hour; the clock seems to slow down. The season is over and now the real season begins with the playoffs. LeBron James is a dribbling Baryshnikov. Michelangelo would have yearned to render him in marble. His look is menacing to the opposition. His body twists and spins into unexpected stanzas. His quick release is like a charged language, sprung.

Grown men in their colored underwear are running back and forth across the page talking fluent trash even with the mute button on. Two zebras with whistles among the gazelles as words roll beyond the margin like loose balls.

It’s all about that hole bigger than the sum of its dimension. Athletes live for holes, from little to big.....golf, billiards, hockey and soccer. A space to be filled, but none to match this game of basketball like a gush of participles dangling on the rim, dropping or sputtering away into the delete button. It’s about getting into the right juxtaposition. Fakes, double pumps and slam dunks when that line, that leaping image brings it home.

This is not baseball, slow-mo and stoic on a summer day. If the National Pastime is that unhurried refuge basketball has caught the zeitgeist. It is the inner-city ferocious tango of finesse and power. Each point scored a punctuation, an assertion to redress a grievance. A riff from Charley Parker.

They are putting it to the gods. The god of normalcy, of margins, making it jagged. LeBron is Icarus defying Newton; he is the apple that won’t fall…yet, graceful beyond any gothic arch with his game-face a gargoyle, the way you might strain to reach for a word not yet grunted, hang-time longer than a sentence by Proust and when he returns to that wood, this page... cartilage might tear as if the small syllables of breath denied his ancestors and his brothers. The score is settled for a moment. The blank page is filled, never quite saying the unsayable.

 

Dogs

Story of my life. Not those adorable four-legged creatures but the dog as in dogma or doggerel barking into other unexpected places.

My adolescent years, which may have extended into my late 20s, were marked first by a no-pet apartment building which prohibited any non-human species except for pet rocks. As I recall, I didn’t even have any stuffed animals or inflatable ones.

What I did have was unshakeable political opinions which found a home in Marxist ideology, the pure form of which has never been tried. Absolutes were a good fit. Somewhere along the way it was pointed out to me that my unyielding beliefs were a kind of dogma. That opened the door a crack.

Enough for me to take up the pen and write bad poetry. Light, juvenile, meaningless doggerel came easily to me and it was, at least, a way to get unserious.

Being un-seriously serious, finding levity in the gravity is one way to weather the storms of life. Not as a strategy, but when it comes naturally, I let it happen.

Take the dogwood tree, for example. It is both cursed and blessed by Christians. Reviled for allegedly furnishing the crucifixion branches and then revered for being associated with redemption and resurrection owing to the floral crosses of their petals. One doesn't question doggedly held metaphors.

My dissertation on dogs finds an ignoble ending with the seriously serious DOGE. Whereas dogs offer a deep emotional attachment, extended compassion and companionship, Musk’s DOGE are dispassionate hounds that bark and snarl. Unlike St. Bernards, famous for rescuing, they have pit-bulled their way into dedicated lives biting off the careers and good work of thousands. They see humans as fire hydrants.

I still have a nose for dogma and the rabid actions of DOGE are no less dogmatic in their acts of despotism. These are the dogs of Bull Connor terrorizing civil rights marchers or the Doberman Pinschers and Rottweilers set upon inmates at Auschwitz. May they soon be muzzled.

Brisket

It seems like everyone is talking about brisket these days. Well, maybe not everyone, but Adele mentioned it the other day and Fred talks about it so often it sounds like a chorus. To top it off I was just listening to Ella sing, A Tisket, A Tasket so it must be calling to me.

In fact, I know nothing about brisket. But I know nothing about many things including fly fishing, subatomic particles, Gregorian chants, the Third Punic War and how just about anything works. 

I can tell you that it may be the only word that rhymes with biscuit… unless you consider Triscuit a word. Brisket, Google says, comes to us from the Norse word busket meaning a felled tree. I suppose some brisket must taste like the gristle of a fallen tree if it hasn’t been slow cooked properly.

Brisket may be one of those staples one should always have at the ready in case people drop in. There are occasions when pickled herring just won’t do. This might be why I don’t get invited to dinner parties anymore. Do people still give dinner parties? It’s been so long I forgot which fork to use.

I’ve always associated brisket with Jewish tables. In fact, I thought it might be a Yiddish word. A derivative of Bris as in circumcision.... but let's not go there. It seems to be standard fare for high holidays, what everyone is waiting for after the words of worship. After all, there is holiness in unexpected places. 

At the last supper, is it true that when the apostles all ordered brisket, Jesus asked for separate checks? We'll never know. 

A map of your average cow shows the state of Brisket bordered by Shank or Shin to the south, Flank to the east and Chuck above. The brisket is Tennessee-like in shape on some Google sites and more New York on others. But always located in the chest area and nowhere near the Sirloin or Tenderloin. I’m glad we’ve settled that much.

Any notion I had that brisket was religiously based were delusional. Texans called it BBQ. My mother called it pot roast. For all I know the Chinese may have assigned it to column B as number 37 on the menu presented as beef-broccoli. It’s also a favorite in Korea, Thailand, Germany and Italy. It could be the universal dish over which summit meetings are held…. unless the leaders are vegetarians, in which case a brisket-like substance must be concocted with transformational soybeans and massively worked tofu.

However, brisket is always a mainstay in Kosher or non-Kosher delis. It is the mother of corned beef or further devolved into pastrami with the right spices. Pile it high and grill it between two pieces of rye bread slathered with Swiss cheese and sauerkraut and the next thing you know you might be looking at a Reuben sandwich. Of course, this wouldn’t be served in a Kosher deli due to the sacrilege of meat and dairy …. a marriage impermissible around orthodoxy; yet another reason why I have strayed far from the flock.    

Can anything more be said about brisket? I’m sure there can but I’m too hungry to go on. Pass the horseradish but hold the gristle. 

What Bounces and Rolls

They are round like oranges and grapefruits, but they bounce, and they roll.  That was my childhood. Throw the tennis ball against the wall and it comes back.  Dribble and it obeys the bounce. A simple return. You learn about action and reaction.

Of course, better not try that with the citrus but they answer with juice and slurp. Young and easy under the apple boughs, said Dylan Thomas. The music in that line has transit, returning me to those languid summers with creative bursts.

And yes, there was an apple tree or was it a peach or lemon? The elbows were for climbing and the shade under those leaves lent itself to hatching movie plots or flights of fantasies higher than a pop fly.

The wall I struck was unusual. It had a ledge and if I struck that perpendicular the ball would carry to distant planets, still in orbit. Better for high bounce was the pink Spaulding which was a rubber ball like the core of a tennis ball without the felt cover.  

Did I bounce and roll? My imagination did, not as huntsmen or herdsmen as in the Thomas poem, but as Astaire or Tracy, with grace and equipoise. If I was mild-mannered Clark Kent, there would be a phone booth close by and a cape at the ready to set the world right.

That particular wall was no ordinary one. It was also the exterior of my father's corner drugstore and became my portal as if I had beaten through it with repeated poundings. I was to become my father. I didn't roll but I did enroll in pharmacy college. 

The bounce eventually propelled me out of childhood. By age 21 I bounced across the country to Los Angeles. In one leap, I had a marriage license and a pharmacy license. For the next 25 years I dribbled my way to a poetic license.

The secret pleasure of growing old is keeping that child alive with what ifs and exclamation points. My two tennis balls are now the back wheels of my walker, but I am still that kid bouncing ideas against the walls of this world.

 

Color Wheel

Residents of Yorkville guzzle beer in vats. (mnemonic to memorize the spectrum) 

 

Crimea river / said Donald to Vladimir /And we'll cut a sliver just for you.

In this great spinning, 

even though the man of no substance

is a colorless man,

yet garish with superlatives, 

must each day be dark and stormy

from smoldering graves and molten

metals gone to particulates?

Gaza is caged and parched

while Ukrainian air is ashen with malice

to make over colors on the map,

while his nothingness, wrapped like a flag

with red tie, white hair and blue suit, 

waves in star spangled subversion.

 

Or can we breathe with green yearning

for the unconditional victory of meadows?

Am I allowed to celebrate 

the forty-watt lamp of sunrise,

the yellow number two pencil?

Even purple prose must be forgiven.

What is the color of silent guns?

I’ll settle for the blue green

negotiation of a teal sky,

a golden cargo on the Black Sea

from a ceasefire across amber waves of grain.

Where a crop of grey landmines

once shadowed the land,

common yarrow now grows wild again.

 

Now, It’s Our Phones, Then It Was…

Radio with that Art Deco speaker, our family's version of the Chrysler Building, out of which came words and music to fill the room. We stared at the wood and fabric design in wonder, mesmerized by its arches and angles framing the dials and knobs. It was modernity itself, both visually and acoustically.

Turn it an eighth of an inch one way you got the philharmonic or the Hit Parade, the other way was the Quiz Kids or Ma Perkins putting a pie in the oven. We believed what we heard. When FDR gave his fireside chat, sixty million Americans were transfixed.

None of us doubted it was Charlie McCarthy’s voice, not the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s. Radio conjured images as if our own inner television screen. We exercised the muscle of our imagination.

The speaker was like the grill of a car. It distinguished the radio and attracted architects and designers to strut their stuff. Even Ferdinand Porsche had a snazzy one on the market in Germany. The R.C.A. brand was advertised in magazines with models swooning over the latest color and shape. 

We were becoming world-class consumers by the 1930’s as we feasted on cereals, soaps and cigarettes. Who could resist those broadcasted jingles?

The radio, whether a console or the size of a shoebox, commanded our attention. If the room was a drug store it would have been that raised place where the pharmacist presided between globes of colored water. If this were a synagogue it would be the bimah where the sacred text is stored. Maybe the druggist was a secret shaman performing miracle healings. I thought of my father that way. Remedies worked because he said they would. 

I also remember that December Sunday when the radio even overshadowed him. I was in his store when a program was interrupted with the news bulletin of Pearl Harbor. We all stared at that walnut wood and cloth speaker. Of course, I didn't know Pearl Harbor from Pearl Mittledorf but I knew it was bad news. I was a few months away from my 9^th birthday; the radio initiated me into the adult world.

Peggy’s Poetry

To celebrate May 2^nd, the birthday of my late wife, Peggy, I thought I'd offer some excerpts from her poetry onto this page. She wrote from her own singular perch. Her language startles with its disparate leaps over a vast inscape. Well into her nineties, she was writing a poem every day with over 150 published in literary journals. Peggy's poetry was an extension of her irrepressible appetite for life, how she met each day with exuberance, gratitude and love.

  ____________________________________

He sees her face half shadowed tilted upward / in the curve of promise, smooth as an early apricot. / He will marry her and plant skyscrapers in their backyard. 

If there is champagne enough / let's give another hoist to the boy / who laughs at the tired shadows on the wall / and paints his reckless masterpiece / with no further expectations.

The sound of blues, not my own / but the low-down songs of women. Love stirs my coffee / the velvet of Yes / A white horse gallops. 

Her fingers trace highways along his arm / In a moment there will be wings, a blue heron / He moves in her direction / as though singing were a map.

Arithmetic leads to ultimate divisions / land mass under water / Yet a boy paddles a bark canoe / confident of the current.

This hiding in the tunnel of myself / denies the chairs their rightful place. Light through the window creates a momentary event / shadows in a drift toward after.

The man I meet on page 125 is now in pieces. / The mirror slants but will not lie / I would prefer to wander the streets of Paris with the artist /despite the chill.

In the hum of murmurations / every bird adjusts astonished air / Clouds contort, these mindless wheels / in the world without allegiance / Horses, round-rumped, dare me to look away.

Women survived in the dark, like feet in pinching shoes until / they turn from Molly Barnacle’s, yes to / Bartleby’s, I prefer not.

The sky bends with the hawk / you answer, your words like water … / and then, the ocean, the wedge / partial like us. / Your look rests on the curve of my cheek.

Can these days really be winter / with your words that match / the fingers as you touch / what you know of me / and even what you don’t?

Everyone looks out the window / wondering if the headlines / move the earth or what / brings hot lentils to the table.

Death has no et cetera / I borrow a motley palette from myself / The canvas will not stretch. / Still-life does not hold still. / Blue oranges turn to mauve, turn to gray. / Unfamiliar music enters the room. (A Mother’s Lament)

As the self pledges its allegiance / to a tidiness of napkins on the table / we stir the gibbous moon into our cups.

The flap of disappearing wings through the open window / This day was for sleep, the accuracy of dreams / closer to words on the notebook’s page / the loss of love.   (for Elizabeth Bishop).

The woman at the piano wears a hat. / His black trousers hold his impatience. / It is 1891, a coachman with tired horses knocks. / At the opera, singers will break the air. / She thinks of his mouth, the taste of wildwood cherries / yet, returning, knives hang in the clock.

Breakfast on the balcony / unlike the insistent birds I wouldn’t interrupt / your timbered voice carrying its sex / filling me with all I know and cannot know of you.

I watched them talk at Sunday supper / My uncle had lost his thunder into buttered toast / waiting for events that already happened / My eyes fixed on the enameled porcelain table / its corner nicked to black. (After the market crash, 1929)

My knees need grease / but the mellow sax delivers me from evil. / Growing old is a privilege, faith / its own vehicle, even as the cab keeps its motor running / and the eucalyptus tree bends lower every year.

Inspiration is drawn to pushy tides / away from headlines and oratory / she hears instead an empty glass on wood / shivers her to what lies below/ Images find their words in the telling, / A cold stone appears in her hand.

I wear the enamel pendant for the shy unsaid / A woman in Japan looks through a rim of tears / He has not gone far, but away / still, she will not say to him / “These days remove me from myself” / her mouth, thick with silence.

For me, a bite of crusty bread / its center soft, a little sour. / Just yesterday you told me / that my love of pan rests in the middle of companion / break bread indeed with the taste of your touch.

Words proclaim the sacred in the unlit candle, / a chipped cup in the sink / This holiness isn't waiting for Godot.

In the airport fog, under his slouched hat, there is Rick / deciding for teary Ilsa, that for them / the slings and arrows might only amount to a hill of beans / and Paradise lost was just as good as Paris regained.

One Hundred Days

April rain,

but tears not enough

to caption this mural of America,

this Guernica.

Amendments shredded. Lives axed.

One hundred days of Artificial Imbecility.

A dainty dish to serve before the king.

 

Yet, yet…

There is always human tropism,

Like bent branch,

An insurrection of green

signifying more than strut and fret.

Let the litter of broken promises 

become our mulch.

New rhizomes and roots 

can be seismically felt

and kindred faces never before 

appear in the street.

Hacked By A Virus

Five days ago, I was visited by a virus. Not that old-fashioned kind, like viral pneumonia, resistant to antibiotics. Or even a new version like the dreaded bird flu. I’m talking about the more virulent one that infected my laptop which is like an appendage.

It took my computer repair man three days to purge the nasty. I suppose the operative word is hacked. The word itself has been hacked. Seventy years ago, plus or minus, when I was in my prime on the basketball court, I was both the hacker and the hackee. Driving in for a lay-up I got routinely clipped, smacked, slapped, slammed, shoved or axed. Hacked, as in hacksaw. In those half-court games, we weren’t even awarded a foul shot; the offended player merely got to take the ball out-of-bounds.  Those were less punitive times.

Being hacked today leaves no bruises but we are even more battered, thrown into a state of disequilibrium, banished into an analog world of pencil and paper. It is a disabling tragedy remedied only by a visit from grandchildren or to a preschool where any four-year-old worth his lunch money could perform miracle healings to the latest ailing technology, learned umbilically in the third trimester.

Who are these hackers? Cyber-freaks who have no other hobbies? Having fun, are you? Does your mother know what you are doing with your life? Have you considered going back to school like your big sister?

I can’t imagine what you want with me and my data. My bank balance, such as it is, seems undisturbed. I haven’t detected a Tesla charged to my credit cards. Maybe you’ve created another me in the cloud. Any chance I can meet my generic equivalent some day? We could chat over a glass of ouzo or kvass. Since you already have my passwords and pin number you might as well fly me to your local watering hole. It’s about time I learned a second language. 

If my hacker hails from Minsk or Pinsk, we may even be distant cousins. Will that grant me any privilege in the hacking community? No, I didn’t think so. Go ahead and pick my pocket. Just leave me my library card and the punch card from the car wash. I'm close to a freebie.

I’m resigned to living my remaining days/months/ years behind a firewall. I don’t know what a firewall is but I’m sure it’s not for pitching pennies or even for climbing. Then again it may be for tunneling under and planting viruses. In today’s world, whatever one can do, one does.

 

Easter, 2021

A priest and an atheist walk into a bar. 

No, that’s not what happened.

A priest and an atheist walk into Peggy’s bedside. (I prefer the word Humanist which is closer to my belief than Atheist which refers only to what I don't believe.) The man of the cloth is Father Patrick Comerford, hospital chaplain. Whatever gold dust he carries is exactly what Peggy has reception for. Her own resources are sparked. His simple presence mends bones, quiets a clamorous heart and recharges her cells.

We talk about pubs in Dublin, the poet / priest Gerard Manley Hopkins and his sister, Irish writers, the history of Trinity College, his days as a tennis champ, his brother the taxi driver, Vin Scully……. everything, thank God, but religion.

Father Paddy could have come out of central casting with his ruddy face, shock of white hair and County Cork brogue. In my early days I remember Hollywood’s Pat O’Brien playing the priest as he walked that last crooked mile with Cagney on the way to the electric chair. Later, came Barry Fitzgerald, with the black gown and the amiable voice bending his elbow with a wee bit of the drink and a well-delivered bit of blarney. Patrick has them all beat.

Miraculously, it was Easter Sunday when he popped in to resurrect Peggy’s spirits. I was to witness a secular mass, no wine nor wafer. Yet she was lifted. Maybe it was the synergy between Father Paddy, Peggy and me. Without prayers or blessings something sacred happened. Humanists, too, work in mysterious ways. There is a spiritual dimension in the moment, quotidian and secular. The sublime hides in the ordinary. 

Our conversation (communion?) ended when the priest got a call on his cell phone. He said it was from the man upstairs.

If the pagan spring festival got folded into the Christian myth, let seasonal renewal and transformation have its way. Let my people go. While April blooms let Peggy have her exodus out of St. John's Hospital.

(Peggy lived to blow out 100 candles a few weeks after this. And on until mid-August 2021. She lived her hundred years plus hundred days, finding the juice even in parched times. There was always a stream, and we rowed together, oar to oar.)

April: National Poetry Month

T.S. Eliot declared April as the cruelest month.  It is and it is not. Referencing that crime against humanity we call World War I, April was the month when military action began, wasting a generation of young men. Human folly can always be counted upon. Cruel indeed as the shock of awakening brings us unfulfilled expectations. 

What can we expect from poetry? Truth, however obliquely stated, perhaps enough to bridge the great divide. While cherry blossoms are dropping their clouds, I want to whoop it up for yet another go around, this happy cycle, even if it is a clash of allegories.

My body is bent but so are those reeds answering the wind. And out of the leafless coral tree at my window, red lanterns hang like banners ahead of the starter’s gun, announcing next month’s combustion of green fired leaves.

If we are under siege, let it be drowned out by the trumpet in the foxglove and migrations overhead, a murmuration of amens. It is also, as Cummings promised, a mud-luscious time. The wasteland is pregnant. Turtles are laying their eggs in roadside soil. If flowers could sing (and they do) let their choir voice our vehemence to the carnage of our national forests soon to fall under chainsaws.

Spring carries our collective memories, of sprung possibilities out of skeletal trees. Under last month’s barren ash tree, where I sat with my friend, we now look up at a lacy umbrella of green; the substance within us that prevails.

The film, That They Should Face the Rising Sun, is visual poetry; an elegy to a small Irish village in which all but a single young couple and a handful of aging town folk have left for pastures greener. But there are no greener pastures than those in this hilly, lakeside county. Plot is nowhere to be seen, nor priest nor pubs. The camera scans the reeds and garden paths, the seasons each to a purpose. Conflicts are made smaller by the enormity of pasture and sky and the pacing quiets a beating heart. We get immersed in the rhythms of dailiness and the cycles of a wedding and funeral with the young poet and his artist wife folding into the adagio of their ways.

In Robert Frost’s Hillside Thaw, we are reminded how the sun lets go / ten million silver lizards out of snow… But if I thought to stop the wet stampede / and caught one single lizard by the tail…I have no doubt I’d end by holding none. The second stanza brings in the wizard moon which turned the swarm to rock and held them all until day, / one lizard at the end of every ray. / The thought of my attempting such a stay.

Frost, like Eliot, brings in the shadow side. Whatever stay he bears witness to against this fractured and uncertain world would be a momentary one. But our lives are just moments strung together.

If April is cruel, so is all emerging life into a world of walls and misplaced rage. Whether we write or not, we can all be poets alert to layers of meaning inherent in everything available to our mind and senses.

Gods of Spring

Gods love good stories, and the ancients told the best ones. Three to four thousand years ago, those fabulists knew how to spin a yarn. How did it all begin? Why doesn’t it rain? When will it stop? Our tribe is better than your tribe. What's with this eclipse? What happens after we die? Behold this spring garden!

Homer and the Hebrews, separately, took a collection of tall tales, songs, imaginings, and assorted folk lore, from sages, pranksters and hallucinogenic gurus…. anything that encouraged the tribe to cohere around a shared ethos and answer the overwhelming questions.

The pivotal moment in human history was when stories were recorded rather than just told. The alphabet took the oral tradition and set it down for evermore. The book solidified male dominance. Greeks let theirs wither into myth. Jews held theirs as sacred and Christians concocted a sequel complete with cheek-turning, crucifixion, resurrection and an edifice complex. However, embedded in these parables are wisdom and conundrums sufficient to ponder over three millennia. 

Athenians of the day took on the story of Persephone who returns from the underworld just about now on the calendar for a six-month sabbatical. She was the offspring of Demeter and Zeus. You’d have thought with parents like that she wouldn’t have been snatched by Hades, brother of Zeus, but she was apparently very snatchable. So it is that bulbs burst and spring flowers bloom right on time and therein lies the seeds of eternal life. 

Jews celebrate the season horizontally rather than vertically. They fled ahead of the pursuing Egyptians and trekked across the desert to their freedom from bondage, only to enslave the Canaanites when they got to the Promised Land. More important is the summit meeting along the way with Moses and Yahweh in the room where it happens. Admittedly, most of what I know comes from Cecil B. DeMille and memories of seders before I was disinvited for heretical thoughts and possibly misbehaving. 

I might add that I do not believe place is sacred. The claim on so-called holy spots became the unholy and senseless reasons for the crusades and today's religious divide. Only human life is sacred, love and the natural world.

Insurrection or resurrection, spring is sprung. Jesus and Moses went up the hill to fetch the Word. Too bad the eleventh commandment wasn't: It's OK to eat shellfish but not OK to hold slaves or oppress others.

The Jesus myth is far bloodier, but blood is merely wine after all, and the narrative had legs. Easter is like yeast rising and the resurrection a bit of a stretch signifying, again, the bursting forth of poppies, daffodils and a havoc of petals painting the desert floor.

Whether up or across, the holidays all go back to pagans (peasants) and the natural world which deserves any attention it can muster in this age of neglect. The fables need to be reconsidered not as literal truth but as literature pointing us to pay attention to the cycles of Nature and blessings it brings. Miracle enough for me. Paying attention, as Simone Weil observed, is a form of generosity and in its purest form, akin to prayer. 

Now that I've offended everyone, I'm going out to smell the flowers and lick some honey off the thorns.

Uniforms

Apparel oft proclaims the man. So said Polonius to his son. In other words, stay away from Ross Dress for Less. And try not to wear a red tie.

No matter what we settle for as guys, it becomes a sort of uniform, like it or not. I have one obligatory suit in my closet. I got married in it about forty years ago. Since then, some moths made a meal of one sleeve, but it is still serviceable for funerals, bar mitzvahs and weddings, but then again thank god for zoom.

Before Zuckerberg’s t-shirt or Steve Jobs’ turtleneck, there were suits. Three-piece or gray flannel or those you could buy at Sears with two pair of pants, all wool gabardine. People wore them to see a play or fly from here to there. I wore a smock, on and off, for over fifty years as a dispenser of assorted remedies and assuring words. Mine disappeared along with Sears.

Maybe they’ve been replaced by tattoos. We’re not our job anymore; we are individuals each making his/her own major statement. Egalitarianism allows us to dress down, to slum or choose a wardrobe out of thrift stores. Designers have lines of scrupulous sloppiness with ventilation at the knees. There are friends I have never seen in jeans and others who always wear them. To each his uniform.

All of which leads me to remember vanished uniforms along with the jobs themselves. Whatever happened to that young woman with her bright jacket and flashlight patrolling the aisles as she hushed us and ushered us kids in the dark movie house, darker still because it was Saturday afternoon and we always came in the middle of a film. Was she dreaming of being discovered, projecting herself on the big screen. Or did she fade to black?

Gone, too, is the doorman with his epaulets, our peacetime commander who lived on tips. He waved, whistled and launched a thousand taxis. Doormen disappeared or did they just live in movies set on 5^th Ave? I imagined these quasi-aristocrats fled Europe as professor or mayor and had to settle for the ignominy of brass buttons.

And where is the elevator operator, in authority for the length of his or her shift, traveling vertical miles on one spot from Icarus to Orpheus as each, alone, contracted and expanded those wrought iron lungs?

The usher had no name but saw plenty of wandering arms in the balcony. Maybe the other two wrote novels in their heads from snatches overheard. They answered to first name only and remembered to speak politely to Mr. and Mrs. …. on the 23^rd floor.

They slipped away unnoticed, loud uniforms, shiny buttons and all. Jackets and caps now in vintage shops, dignity and pride embedded in the fabric. In one pocket dried lipstick and a stick of gum. In another an empty flask and a check for two bucks, uncashed.

 

 

Channeling Raymond Chandler

The sun was just a rumor. It disappeared like a corpse in Edgar Allen Poe's basement. The sky had a battered look as if it got kicked in its vitals. The western sun fought its way through the cloud cover as it was setting, the way a washed-up middleweight let his bling shine as he called it quits fighting youth in slow motion.

Last night was part of that haze. The goon hiding behind the lamp post had been following me since I left Santa Anita. He had a face like the pony that got stuck in the starting gate. I waited for him when I turned the corner at Alvarado and 6^th, pulled the straw hat over his face and frisked him.

The next thing I remember is waking up inside the G.I. rubbish tank in the alley behind Izzy’s Deli smelling from week-old whitefish and pickled herring.

Izzy was a friend of mine since I let him take me at poker. When I paid him off in two-dollar bills, he put me on his menu under lamination. A Norm Levine: Lox and cream cheese on a bagel with heirloom tomato and cucumber for $2.75, including a Schlitz beer.

I staggered home at midnight and took the longest shower since Noah’s flood. When I got to my feet today for another round, my left eye mirrored the bruised sky. The phone rang louder than the buzz in my head.

The voice in my ear warned me to lay off investigating the dame. That’s all I needed to keep going even if there was less to it than met my knuckled eye.

A forgettable man of mediocre mind had popped into my office last week. I was a sucker for his Peter Lorre eyes and Sydney Greenstreet guffaw. When he announced himself as Murray Hill, I already had his number. He said he wanted me to keep an eye on his sister. I knew he was lying behind a bogus smile like William Buckley's and the way he wiped his sweaty palms with his pink tie. But I was getting ten bucks a day plus expenses, and I needed the dough for my rent, due on Monday.  

I trailed his so-called sister to the Spitfire Grill behind a hangar at the Santa Monica airport. The place was swarming with gumshoes, hoods and undercover cops spying on each other. If you had money to launder, you’d come to the right place.

Looking up from behind my Look magazine I started to ponder the meaning of life in a godless world forgetting that I already did that in the shower last night. If I came up with an answer it disappeared into my oatmeal this morning.

But nothing else fits in this cockeyed world, like what I'm doing here with my good eye on the blonde who turned out to be the twin of a redhead that took the rap and did a stretch up the river for packing a rod. Her face curled the bacon in my BLT. She blew me a kiss that could launch a thousand props on Piper Cubs.

I was ready to blow this joint when I felt something heavier than a double cheeseburger landing on my head. The world is spinning, and I'm deciding to quit this racket and enroll in pharmacy school, recalling my mother's words about finding something I can always fall back on.

I was just a soft-boiled guy in a hard-boiled world.

Circus of Hell

Words travel. From confidence to con. Confidence comes to us from the Latin, fidere meaning trust or good will and con as in joining together. We confide in each other. How far we have devolved can be measured by the term confidence man or con man. The word has been flipped.

First there was Phineas. The autobiography of P.T. Barnum was the bestselling book in the second half of the 19^th century after the Bible. Apparently, we love the con. We can’t get enough of the schemer, his ingenuity and audacity. It’s O.K. if it involves deceit, cheating and greed. After all, capitalism is all about scrambling to the top of the heap. Whatever it takes. It says nothing about how you get there, or the victims of the fraud. Call them losers.

Herman Melville’s last novel published in his lifetime (Billy Budd came posthumously) was titled The Confidence Man.  It is set on a riverboat making its way down the Mississippi. We are presented with an array of stock-scammers, charity hustles and panacea-peddlers. They feed on the trust of the sucker born every minute.

Try a bottle of this pain-dissuader or raw milk. What have you got to lose, says the man with a worm in his brain? Only a bout of listeria, e. coli or salmonella.

We think we have the nose to know what can’t pass the smell test. But consider the trouble in River City, cure-alls, the flimflam man or the hidden persuaders who have us buy $800 running shoes.

When institutions are deemed to be corrupt and inefficient, a vacuum is created which allows the demagogue to rush in with a compelling narrative, however false, with appeal to the aggrieved. Everyone wants to be part of a new movement even if it creates a circus of hell.

The con man is so named because he first gains our confidence which translates into a massive suspension of disbelief. Swallow the hoax and all the rest follows.

The enemy is out there surrounding us in the jungle, said Jim Jones. The Deep State is destroying America, folks. Those immigrants are taking away your jobs and raping our wives in their spare time. Big Pharma is vaccinating us to death.

The riverboat chugs along with half of America on it. Who wants to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?

 

My Alternative Universe

I’m told by friends, who don’t want to hurt my feelings, that they enjoy my blogs…. except for those about baseball. I can only sympathize with their loss. Then again, my brow is too low for opera and I never subscribed to Mechanics Illustrated. We all have our deprivations.

The season about to begin offers an alternative universe to distract me from the real world. It’s a matter of keeping my child alive while finding a human drama, unrehearsed and unrigged, which makes more sense than the seismic upheaval we are living in.

Many great poets and writers have embraced the game. Among them are May Swenson, William Carlos Williams, John Updike, Marianne Moore, Donald Hall, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jack Spicer and Shakespeare. I just threw him in to see if you were paying attention.

There are haikus in the outfield grass and sonnets in the turning of innings. Consider the clash between stats and hunches, precision and randomness. It is a triumph of the inexplicable, linear as a board game, yet with a simultaneity of many moving parts.

The confluence of wood and sphere which reminds the poet in us of an epiphany on the page. The pause between pitches, between innings as if stanzas might be written. The crowd focused on the lone batter. His futility to hit the unhittable or say the unsayable. Slumps like writer’s block. And what of streaks when everything feels so right, so easy and they have exceeded themselves? The fastball down the middle they’ve been waiting for.

The next word, next pitch is unknown. Where does it come from? The poet’s line travels faster than a radar gun and defies gravity with a leap. The game is new every day or night. A curtain goes up on today’s theater. When you may think nothing is happening consider the gulls counting innings waiting to descend for a midnight feast. Regard the umps in black anticipating the next play. Coaches wiggling signs. Fielders in deliberate choreography. The pitcher with his leg kick. The hitter with his cleats, fidgeting with Velcro on his batting glove. Arm angles, launch angles. The route less taken in centerfield. Tarpaulin rolled out for the thunderstorm, gnats of August, October fog. The wind seen in the flag.

The rhythms of the game are poetic. The pitch, the crack, the dash, the throw…. constitute the line or stanza and then the long interval. It can be mythopoeic with outsized heroes, goats, scandals of the fix, the drugs, the curse, stats of super-human feats never to be met. Those glory days which get better every time I remember the feel of perfect contact which renders words incapable.

Baseball is a long haul. A season of sore arms, spiked calves, hitches in swings, pulled muscles, hours in the weight room, taunts from fans, ups and downs. Some salaries are obscene, some are bargains. Careers are uncertain and then what? It’s a game; it’s a business.  A magnificent regression to childhood. It was the first thing I knew that my parents didn’t. A time when we weren’t quite sure what mattered……but this would do for a while as we grew up and some of us never did.

Given its century and a half of tradition and constancy, it creates an illusion of order, strategy and permanence. Every spring is marked by whiffs of hot dogs, mowed grass, cracks of the bat and thwack of a ball in a mitt. Like birdsong, it ushers in spring and the held breath of possibilities.

 

Many Thanks

Many thanks for all your happy birthday greetings. For a while I thought maybe I had already died but it slipped my mind, and this was part of my afterlife.

As ill-fitting as that word, HAPPY, may seem in these days of dread, I'm reminded it was promised to us as an inalienable right in the pursuit of happiness.

Even as our heritage seems suddenly more distant, let us celebrate each other.  

My Birthday Tomorrow

Age is of no number. More and more, it means less and less. Now, the calendar says I am 92. How is this possible? I’m also 17, 29, 40, 60 and dammit, 92 (dyslexic 29). We live to defy the numbers. The imagined candles on my imagined cake could burn the house down but my feet remain on the ground, at the ready for buoyancy.

My architecture and inventory are original equipment. Given all the cells that slough off I’m lucky those marbles in my brain seemed to have repaired themselves better than my joints. So happy birthday, organs, new and old. 

Life is the great poem I could never write; but living it is better. Nothing much rhymes except with itself, and the last lines are still being lived, no end in sight.

I can't come to the phone right now. I’m communing with the barren branch of the coral tree outside the window; the two of us clinging to a memory of summer. I see no sign of chlorophyll, yet I feel certain another season is on the verge. A belief, as Cummings put it, in the leaping greenly spirit of things, illimitably Earth.

I want to say it is fun being old, this last chapter of the great adventure. In spite of the funeral of democracy, I find myself laughing a lot. Anne Lamott calls it carbonated holiness. I’m filled with gratitude and daily amaze. And I still have much to learn from my three daughters and dear friends.

Consider the furniture in this room. As if for the first time I'm gazing at the contours of the table across from me which I hadn’t really given its due. I am even enjoying the near empty shelves which, until recently, housed about two thousand books. In a sense we grow by subtraction.

I can still hear echoes of their discourse. Wendell Berry huddled with Barry Lopez.  Wallace Stevens with Helen Vendler. Wiliam Trevor telling yarns to Niall Williams and Jane Kenyon in dialogue with Eleanor Wilner as well as the ghosts of Kunitz, Roethke and Stafford. All of them exercise my imagination. I am also learning to find alignment with their absence and what is unsayable within myself.

I’m told I was born on March 21^st. I wouldn’t know. As I recall I was busy that day. Surely the date of my arrival is a tribute to family planning. I never took my mother and father to be such visionaries. The first day of spring is Nature’s birthday, at least in this hemisphere. I took my first breath as the lilies were exhaling, and hyacinth bulbs emerging. Whales and migratory birds were in transit on their appointed paths. Seasonal resurrection was in the air.

Somewhere along the way, the firmament shifted, and the vernal equinox moved from the 21st to the 20th. It must have been from Bach's organ music. He shares a birthday with me.

Not everyone can claim an equinox. Equal parts day and night make for a balanced life, granting the shadow side its due. I do have a hate-list which includes dictatorships, religious orthodoxies, willful nescience (junk science) and goat cheese.

Astrologically speaking, a language in which I have no fluency, I have lived my life on the cusp. Part ram (Aries), part fish (Pisces). I’ll settle for amphibian, half in, half out of water, and take my chances. Gurgle and Baa. The cusp has granted me a view from the bridge with an occasional glimpse into the beyond.

The secret to longevity is that there is no secret to longevity.

Pharmacy Life and Times

I am the very model of a modern major pharmacist
I’m armed with information considered fundamentalist
of uses and abuses and all things memorizable
of dosages that are toxic I know what’s over-sizable.
I decipher scribbles which to others seem illegible
am conversant with insurance cards oftentimes, ineligible
of itches that are topical or twitches that are tropical
I know what is historical from those things just hysterical,
an alchemist, an herbalist, occasionally a sorcerist
I am the very model of a modern major pharmacist.

I retired from pharmacy about twenty-five years ago having sold my store to a Russian family. At least I thought of them as Russian since they spoke the language, hated Gorbachev and greatly admired Putin. Gorby, they said, was weak and destroyed the motherland. But Vlad had muscles. In fact, they were from Odessa. Go figure.  

Looking back, I recognize that I never had a passion for pharmacy. At seventeen I was a man-child when I made the decision to pursue my father’s profession. It was a life of counting and pouring. The old vapors of crude drugs which I had grown up with in my nostrils had long given way to deodorized tablets and capsules on the shelf. Gone were the mortar and pestle, ointment slab and spatula and even the torsion scale and weights.

Over time, I realized it was the relationships with patients that enlivened me. Even if I didn't fully know them, I knew what kept them alive.

I stayed on after I sold the store, but the clientele slowly became Russian-speaking and my two-word vocabulary of goodbye (das vidaniya) and thank you (spasibo) didn’t go very far.

The virtue I possessed was that I knew how to listen empathetically. I heard people’s woes, and they felt received. As for the essential expertise, if I didn’t know it, I could find it quickly. When I couldn’t attend to my customer/patient I knew I had lost my reason for being there.

My father, in his corner drugstore, had presided on a raised platform between globes of colored water. Over the years, pharmacy lost its mystique. We had become human vending machines. At some point, I started to write poems in between labels; my prescription for myself. Das Vidaniya, pharmacy. 

Coping

I’ve never cared much for dystopian novels, but I’d rather read about them than live in one as we are now. This is the age of muck and mire or rather musk and liar whose wet dream of scrupulously planned turmoil has been realized.

It may be mayhem to us but, as the elder Corleone said to Corleone the younger, it’s business, son just business. Everything done in the name of governance during this current regime is really all about business, about avarice, money and domination.

It remains for us to figure our way out of or through the carnage. If there is to be a wolf at the door let it be Wolfgang Puck or the novelist Tobias Wolfe rather than the bearer of bad news like Wolf Blitzer. Better yet, I might raid the local library’s shelf of Thomas Wolfe.

Nobody writes like Wolfe anymore. He gushes …but with eloquence. His spigot must have been missing a washer. He creates a torrent of words you find yourself swimming in, which is not a bad way of spending the next few years. Look Homeward Angel, a mere 662 pages, was a bestseller in the 1920s.

His next novel, Of Time and the River, was intended to rival Proust’s seven volumes. It came in at over a million words which he dumped on the desk of his editor, Maxwell Perkins. Over a thousand words got trimmed to a final heft of 912 pages. You Can’t Go Home Again was published posthumously.

If those three books aren’t enough sand to bury my ostrich head into, then I could turn to that other wolf, Virginia, spelled Woolf.

She wrote the way Monet painted. Phrases like brushstrokes. A gesture here, fraction of dialog there, shadows on the wall, a room in the silence of doilies. Images receive the lift of her language. Scenes drift, then return in mid-sentence. Time slides. I could happily dwell in the realm of her interior monologues as if in the music of a cello.

Two wolves, howling at the moon at opposite poles in their writing styles. One spare, one effusive. They died within three years of each other. He suddenly at age 38, she by suicide in 1941. Let their sentences have their way with me. My letters of transit.