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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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 5th 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 23rd 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.
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 6th, 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.
