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.