Well-Remembered Rain

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

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

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

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

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

 

Poem From the Ashes

Gaza in the Palisades

Leveled to sameness

Millions as kindling

Firestorms as if…

No shield for embers

Acres vacant, evacuated

What money can’t buy

Hydrants drip by the sea

Walls between gone

Gone to gusts uncontained

No home, no homeland

From desert to the sea

Cease fire cease

An occasion to gather

To share worldly goods

To wake to what is.

 

 

 

 

By Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Great Thoughts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's Looking At You

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

List / Lust

The verbs, to Lust and to List, have common roots. An intense desire morphed into an inclination to one side as in a boat listing and finally to a shopping list or as one might have said in the 19^th century, a Chopin Liszt. 

All of which leads to one’s preferences as in a year-end summation of the most notable. Count me out. This will be a list of why I don’t make lists.

Since my memory is both too short and too long, I stay away from such conventions. Too short to remember what happened 2-3 weeks ago and too long so that 70 years ago seems like yesterday.

I could list my favorite vegetables: asparagus, eggplant and beets but then again, I might also say artichoke, squash and yams. And what about spinach, corn and cauliflower, but really who cares? Not me.

Lists change because we are alive, and the world doesn’t hold still for a minute. If I made a list of my favorite books or movies today, I could be sure to have left out a few for tomorrow’s list.

The worst thing about lists is the verticality, the hierarchy which relegates one work of art above or below another. It speaks to our competitive nature which demands winners and losers. I'm thinking about all those acceptance speeches we'll never hear, of deathless prose, crumpled up in the purses and tuxedos of also-rans. 

Peggy and I went to Europe eleven times. When someone asks what my favorite trip was, I say they were all tied for first place. Nor do I rank my friends. Everyone has something different to make them outstanding and perhaps each taps into a slightly different version of myself.

Must we really choose between Ella and Billie? Mozart and Beethoven? Kieslowski and Bergman? Streep and ? Make room for all of them.  

Lastly on my list of no-lists is that it is an indulgence to fix our gaze backward. If we are to live in the now, it calls for lusting after the bliss of unknowing, that life still to be lived.

 

Homecoming

119 million people are traveling this holiday season. Since my family never celebrated either Chanukah or Christmas, my recollections are few except for all those vivid memories that never quite happened.

What did happen was the dread I felt in 5th grade when we were assigned to draw a holiday scene. A one-horse open sleigh was not in my skill set. Even a picture of hanging stockings was beyond me. If I'd known about abstract expressionism I might have gotten a gold star. As it was, with a nickel and quarter I traced a thirty-cent snowman and called it a day. (It's O.K. not to be good at everything).

Another almost true experience happened at around age twelve. For one day I worked in a Christmas tree lot in Forest Hills, which had neither forest nor hills. I didn’t return when my nose fell off into a cup of hot cider. 

Then there was the time when I sped down an incline in my flexible flyer. The bottom of the slope was the Grand Central Parkway. Even with my three sweaters to protect me I was never heard from again. It was a quick demise as I recall. For the next eighty-one years I've been enjoying my afterlife.

One year, out of pity, I was given a Monopoly set, the board game which rewarded winners with hotels on Boardwalk. I never got past Marvin Gardens. It was my fate to remain mostly on Baltic and Mediterranean. Life follows art.

Homecoming has always been a popular theme of holiday movies. Prodigal grown-up children return home to siblings or old flames or to reconcile with their crypto-fascist father who beat them for sport...or worse. But it's Ho, Ho, Ho time and all is forgiven over toasted marshmallows, gift-wrapped scarves and a Rockwellian dinner. 

The home, the haunt. That word, haunt, originally meant to visit or appear frequently or as the noun... an old haunt. Nothing haunts us like memory. So, in another version, we return hoping to recover shards of ourselves, which is to say, to recover our youth as it might have been.

In Greek mythology Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War and got a well-deserved short, sharp shock in his kishkes by his wife, Clytemnestra. Ulysses took his time slaying dragons within and the fury of the Gods. When he finally showed up after ten years, he embodied modern man, conniving, pragmatic and ferocious, while Penelope raveled and unraveled the woven tale. 

My brother was never at home in this world. He returned after three years in the army and remembered why he had left. Within a month he was gone again in the grip of his haunts. He died in his thirty-third year, driving in an alcoholic haze. Maybe he heard the mermaids singing.

My life is visited by returning haunts, not spooks but good spirits hovering. Janice is here tending to me lovingly. Lauren and Shari are many miles away, yet I feel them close to me in this room. We are singing off-key in our separate versions of what was, exchanging the gift of ourselves and our amazing journeys.

You can't go home again but we keep rowing toward Eden anyway.