Conversational Jam

 That’s what we do, over lunch or dinner; a table for two, three, four or more. Our words, our intervals make music, unrehearsed. Call it conversation or call it improvisation. We jam. brass, bass and basoon. I can’t hear you. Muffled vibes. Sometimes words over each other. That reminds of the time I… There goes a monologue, unzipped, a solo, saxing an amazement, a complaint, a plea. Digressing, Jammin'. Cymbals might clash, double reeds reconcile. Every time is never before. This ensemble. We riff. We say our piece. There's always room for the odd ball, the contrarian. Ornette Coleman dares in his wailing. Thelonius meanders down the river of his realm. We listen and hear our own instruments syncopating.

Men jam a different sound. Trumpets. Drum rolls. World War II reenacted again. Moving salt and pepper shakers around the way he surrounded the troops, the way you sank the winning basket. He percusses to persuade. Another toots his horn how he rebuilt his engine. Baritone sax like a jack-knifed big rig. That ain’t nothing, catch this trombone. Unstill the utensils. The Bird speaks a new language on tenor sax.

Women pass the Prosecco. piano and flute. Sweetmeats, anyone? Their strings pluck the drizzled salad. Sounds of how. Questions the bass asks up and down. Clarinet me more, do tell. Here’s a sidebar and the others hum and sway. It must be jelly ‘cause jam don’t shake like that. Take five. Cello me home.

 

Pits and Seeds

 I was a farmer once,

not tilling the back forty

but I nursed a grapefruit pit

I had planted in a pot on the window sill.

After a season of not over-watering

I had a bumper crop of green leaves.

At least that’s how I want to remember it.

 

I gave up agricultural husbandry

around age eleven never quite knowing

a seed from a pit until now.

Pits are in watermelon, right? Wrong.

Those are just big seeds pregnant

with embryos like poets on the verge.

Pits are the stones in peaches or plums

protecting the genius of the burst.

As for that grapefruit on the sill

it has taken me eighty years

to get my head out of the rind

from the pits to the seed.

 

And when the cymbals clang

or the phrase wings in

through the wall, through the noise,

it is a seed as in the citrus, 

music dripping with juice.

Logical Illogic in Wonderland

Order is the greatest which holds in suspension the most disorder, holds it in such a precarious balance that threatens its overthrow. So said the poet Stanley Kunitz. 

If ever there was a man whose right and left brain spoke to each other, Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) was the guy. A true polymath, he was equal parts Dionysian and Euclidean; his own mirror image as if he had walked through the looking glass. He was an ordained minister, a photographer whose work hung in the Royal Academy, wrote eleven books on math and most famously two children's books best read by adults. 

Carroll found the absurdity in Victorian convention through language, a kind of order turned on its head into a chaos of serious fun as when his Jabberwocky burbles his ambles. and before you can make sense of it off he goes galumphing. 

Was there a subtext or was he on a madcap romp? I think his genius was the way he hid a sobering agenda. Was the Mad Hatter, for example, afflicted by the toxic mercury used in the millinery trade? There is a menagerie in the garden with dandelions, snapdragons and tiger lillies. Well-named for benign menace. It is a Peaceable Kingdom in mid 19th century England....or is it?

In poetry one can assume each word has been weighed and carries with it a secondary reference. When Lewis Carroll mentioned qualities of sand in his Walrus and the Carpenter poem he may have been thinking about the sand in an hourglass which is code for mortality and how he would miss Alice as she left childhood and innocence behind.

Words are for leaping in some poets’ hands. Rub them together and sparks fly. Of shoes and ships and sealing wax and Cabbages and Kings When Dodgson / Carroll brings in Tweedledee and Tweedledum as mirror images, could he not be speaking of his two selves, Dodgson the math and logic professor and Carroll, the playful spinner of yarns? Add to this a third self, the social satirist taking a swipe at British Imperialism. And then there may be lurking a pedophile but let's not go there.

 Consider the Walrus and Carpenter landing on a beach where the sun is shining at night. Sounds a lot like another colony in a distant part of the Empire upon which the sun never sets. Not to belabor the point but those shoes and ships and sealing wax are all part of Victorian civility along with cabbages and kings. Gobbling oysters is what colonists do to native populations. It is all about domination and those cunning settlers.

Can a conservative, devout, tradition-loving Oxford professor with a penchant for postulates and proofs also write so-called nonsense verse translated into seventy languages which hides, within the lines, a disparaging view of the establishment? Of course, we contain multitudes and that is what poetry can do. Shine a light upon a dark corner of society which would be deemed subversive in a more frontal attack?

On the other hand, maybe there is no need for cryptic messages. I don't want to analyze it to death. Carroll's poem stands on its own walrus feet. Millions have read it since publication in 1871, finding delightful bafflement in its illogical logic.  

Driving

There was a time when

I knew if I made this light

I’d have the next five.

I would take 11^th or 14^th street

to avoid the speed bumps.

Now on my way to elsewhere

I take my driving slow,

enjoy the canopy of trees

(My friend said if it weren’t for speed bumps

he’d have no sex life at all.) 

I have no road-rage in me.

I'm making good time at any speed.

When a poem comes to me 

I write a few words

in the dust on my dashboard.

I can almost smell the cloverleaf,

the curvaceous on-ramps.

I forgive everyone their folly.

Maybe their wives are about to deliver

one of new persons in this world.

I can move over and make room.

We are in this together. We stop

and we go obeying the lights.  

It is called civilization. It gives me hope.

I am steering, asserting and yielding

into the flow, this river of chrome,

now a white water rapid with changing rhythm,

now a symphony, an adagio of traffic

and I in my psychic space with four empty seats,

my mind meandering with great thoughts,

so great I am allowed only a glimpse

in this vehicle, this vessel, this life.

Buoyant April

April is a happening month: Exodus, Easter, eager wildflowers, beginning baseball season and tax-time. However, we shouldn’t forget the most notable holiday: National Poetry Month.

T.S. Eliot proclaimed April as the cruelest month in his Wasteland poem. It was the month that began WWI which punctured the notion of progress, while reminding us of evanescent beauty, loss of faith and ultimate mortality.

A voice of gloom, he was. Not the guy I want to split a pizza with. My impulse is to celebrate life even with all its lethal folly.

Now more than ever we need an antidote to the violence of bulletins, bullets and bullshit. Poetry demands a different kind of reading than a newspaper. Words. well-chosen, can fill the page like impressionist brushstrokes. Even between the words there can be found a vitality to buoy us and open a shuttered heart or lift us like a resurrection. It is not a bus to paradise but transport to authenticity. A successful poem has a ring of truth and a music of its own.

One doesn’t need to write poetry to be a poet. It has to do with allowing that sensibility to find expression; to engage life metaphorically and find associations between this and that. It is less a way of saying than a way of being. One can live their poem.

I thought to take this occasion to offer some poems I wrote years ago which I recently came across.

Work

A warehouseman lifts a crate / and his arms are holding a child.

With a cleaver in his hand / the butcher watches a rose / bloom on his apron.

Under the hydraulic lift / seven colors arrange themselves / at the mechanic’s feet.

Hauling peat bog in Connemara light at eleven at night / iridescent dragonfly.

Moments, unsummoned, ease their way in / blood, oil and petals.

 ___________________________

Grandpa Harry

He was the kid wheeled by pushcart

from Warsaw to Hester Street.

hiding the rotten peaches on the bottom.

Winter meant gloves with holes

for his fingers to count on

and thaw over an ashcan cooking chestnuts.

He saw out of the sides of his eyes

for grabbing hands.

He could yell in four languages,

shut his ears to all of them

and to the hooves beating

their barouches and curses on the cobblestone.

                   

Crickets make him nervous

when they hesitate,

then start up again

rubbing their legs together         

bargaining for his life.     

Words and chestnuts were cheap, he said

seventy years later in our backyard.

He still can’t listen much

but remembers more than he ever heard.

He needs his noise-

it keeps his blood moving.                   

Cosmic Vibe Over Lunch

More than a foursome over lunch

we were a quartet. Adele and I fed lines

to Gayle and Tommy in a singing conversation

over the menu as the American songbook.

Every dish, a cue. Avocado on the side led to

Frim-fram sauce and chafafa on the side,

an oldie but goodie from Nat Cole. 

Don’t bother morphed into 

Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.

We were aligned but not to be eclipsed.

(We looked at each other in the same way then.)

We found a cosmic music of the spheres in falafel,

the harmonic hum in the salad bowl. 

You say tomayto, I say tomahto.  

Tell the waiter, Anything Goes.

We sang our way through the dread.

At the drop of, Is that all there is,

Gayle became Peggy Lee.

Then let’s keep dancing, Tommy chimed in

over the omelet and salmon wrap

We were bewitched; we were beguiled.

A Bird in The Tree Is Worth Two On The Page

We came to a screeching halt. About a dozen people were looking up at the sky. I thought maybe Superman had spotted a phone booth or Icarus was being grounded for offending the gods with wax melting on his chutzpah.

But no, their eyes were fixed on the branches of a tree. We were driving in a desert area of Moreno Valley outside of Palm Springs. These were a group of bird-watchers in ecstasy over an oriole. They were in the middle of a heated dispute over whether it was orange-yellow or yellowish orange and was it a bobolink or a Baltimore oriole with no sense of direction. Birders have quick eyes and acute ears listening for the trills or see-yew song. 

And what kind of tree was it, I hear you ask. It was medium height with lots of leaves where birds might come and go in anonymity. It could have been a Joshua or an overgrown pinyon or maybe a common elm. I’m a big city guy and, as a kid, trees were 1^st base or the goal line. Maple and elm were bus stops. Yes, it’s true, as a poet I should be able to honor them with a caption. But my unknowing helped define me by who I'm not.

I’m throwing names around like I know what I’m talking about. In fact, I don’t know a sparrow from a swallow. Thank God for Google where one can get to impersonate a birder on paper at least. Lo these many years I have managed to live in the bliss of ignorance in terms of Nature. I can identify a willow only if it is weeping.

Am I allowed to love trees without a glossary of I.Ds? I enjoy watching their greenery swaying to capricious gusts of wind. I’m transfixed by the reptilian roots of fig trees and how branches reach for the sun with contorted elbows.

As for birds I know a hummingbird from a crow and a sandpiper from a gull but not much else. My head hangs in shame. I wonder if a rufous-sided towhee flew in my window, would it recognize itself in the Audubon book on my coffee table. If names confer mastery, I’m content living in an aviary without dominion. I would be in constant awe of their plumage even as they remained nameless.

 

 

Artifacts

Millennia from now when paleontologists sift through the rubble of what was once the fabled city of Los Angeles, they might stumble upon five million black rectangles, some baffling golden arches, museum-quality hard drives, and empty sidewalks with blue tents. Suppose they discovered a couple of bowling balls and a basketball court. What could they possibly make of this? From all that, they will be tasked to reconstruct a civilization.

Legend had it that we were a city of frozen yogurt shops and something called nutmeg-dusted frappuccinos but those relics could not be found. 

Residue from the stomachs of us ancient humans offers sufficient evidence of a lifestyle and bone structure so that a face can be re-imagined. The alimentary canal of a devout vegan can easily be distinguished from a meatatarian’s mastications with the DNA of ketchup.

How could they reconcile hunger and obesity? What would they think having found particles of threads from red caps on the skeletal remains of a species of humanoids with altered brains, alongside issues of Scientific American and shards of Enlightenment texts? Did these people in the early 21st century live in the Dark Ages or a rather advanced culture? Very vexing.

How will we be seen in the natural history museum of the distant future? Dead fish alongside plastic baggies and Styrofoam cups, advanced electronics gone to weaponry, architectural wonders and oil slicks. What strange people we must have been.

Yet there are uncut forests, land mass still untouched by rising seas and high deserts with a havoc of wildflowers and remnants of violins. The diggers sifting through our remains are descendants of those who somehow survived the 21st century cataclysm in sufficient numbers to have started over again, stuck as they are with our double helix.

One Man's Garbage

A trip to the trash bin got me in conversation with our landlord. He lords over the land, in the best sense, taking on a stewardship of the grounds. His name is Leigh (pronounced Lee) as in the 18th century poet, Leigh Hunt or as in Vivian Leigh. Leigh is one of those gender-neutral names. Even though most of the letters are silent, our Leigh has a booming voice that can rattle the dishes and probably registers on the Richter scale. The old English meaning of Leigh is meadow which is entirely appropriate.

His thumb is exceptionally green. He is happy planting and pruning in the garden which borders the building on three sides. We chatted alongside a flowering tree he identified as apricot. He said that a tenant, George D., back in the mid 80s, had a habit of throwing his pits and seeds in the earth, and this fruit tree is the result. Old George is now memorialized with white flowers in February, darling buds in May and orangey fruit in July. The branches angle sharply for the sun, obeying their own logic; the kind of tree-ness I most admire.

The garbage I was disposing of was a bag of shredding, rind, celery leaves, egg shells, fruit pits and melon seeds. An all-organic mulch if I had buried it, decomposing to nitrogen, sulfur and other plant nutrients. An entire Farmer’s Market could push its way through the earth. Maybe rice paddies or a sugar plantation would sprout by next year.

The truth is I’ve not planted much in my lifetime except three blossoming daughters and a bushel of words. But I can picture George furtively scattering his refuse in the flower bed 25 years ago ensuring his immortality.

George was a retired mail carrier back then. I wonder if he scattered junk mail in the same way. No, not George. I remember him as my go-to guy when I needed some fix-it work. I’m glad to have him back, still bearing fruit.

Since George’s apricot pit now graces us I would think that groves of bucolic greenery must be rising out of landfills. Yet my image of such dumps is of vultures wheeling overhead and impoverished families scavenging. On the other hand who knows what ancient garbage lies beneath the great farms and parks of our planet?

Leigh is still out there tending his garden to the ovation of hummingbirds who regularly sip at his buffet of assorted nectar from azaleas to zinnias. Red lanterns will soon emerge on the coral tree and I can almost hear daffodils bursting their bulbs to trumpet the Spring. I leave the rest to George.

At Home In The Muddle

Yes, yes, make order out of chaos,

that eleventh commandment.

Then why do I remember the fuzzy part,

that white horse in Nova Scotia that was a llama

or the anarchy of wild bulbs

overthrowing the desert,

how we spent an afternoon spotting a whale

that turned out to be a huge black rock?

Then there was the slow-moving train out of Delft

that wasn’t moving at all; only the illusion

owing to the adjacent one.

What did she mean when she said that or

didn’t say anything? Hard to read moods

with gusts of wind shifting the conifers

and the red canvas a commotion

of projections.

While I’m at it, who stole my camera

by the Strasbourg Cathedral? Maybe God,

that all-mischievous puppeteer. The long hand

of subtraction reminding me of the auberge

at the bend in the river by that village in Brittany

where there is no river

except for the waterway winding  

around my head in the MRI?

It is Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle

about which I am certain. To live in the muddle,

that familiar chaos we call order

as in a song I forgot the words to

or the movie of my life where I came in

toward the end with eyes still wide with the sun.

 

Books and More Books

From where I am sitting, I can spot nine bookcases. All but two are floor to ceiling. There are five more in another room. I haven’t seen the walls for over thirty-five years.

I like living with the cacophony of voices in the surround of Kazantzakis in discourse with Lawrence. Amichai with Trevor.  Joyce with Stevens. There are three wolves on my shelves who cannot agree on the spelling of their names: Virginia Woolf, Thomas Wolfe and Tobias Wolff. Off in the corner is McLuhan trying to make sense of Wittgenstein. It has been a sort of an on-going fantasy dinner party.

However, maybe the time has come to provide them with a new homeland. What feels cozy to me smells musty to others. One friend says when he steps into the room it has the feel of a Parisian apartment. I hope he doesn’t mean Van Gogh’s garret. It’s that antiquarian bookstore whiff; perhaps a habitat for bookworms and assorted creatures who dwell between once-upon-a-time and happily ever after. Pages of books are, after all, organic substances.

Nine of them, I wrote. Peggy wrote a dozen. Together there are over sixty literary journals containing our work. Those, of course, are keepers. The truth is many volumes remain scrupulously unread by me. Peggy had bought books in the 1930s. When she was twenty-one, I was a semiliterate nine year-old.

Over the years I have given away hundreds but books seem to multiply. They have offspring. When I rediscover a poet, I find myself buying more of her work.

The dilemma remains: to liquidate now or posthumously, which is to say dump it all on my daughters and stepson while playing the harp in my afterlife. I invite anyone reading this to drop in and pluck certain authors from the shelves as long as you give them the love to which they have grown accustomed.  

It Happens Every Year At This Time

 I get to be a year older. My birthday today used to be the vernal equinox but I seem to have lost that distinction owing to the whims of the firmament.

It has taken me ninety-one years to get this far. I may be old but rumors that I knew Aristotle are untrue. I did, however, call him one day and got his answering machine which, I swear, sounded more like Plato’s voice.

It is fun being old; perhaps the closest thing to being young again. Far from seeing with jaundiced eyes, the world appears to be newly sprouted. Each day is an orange I find myself squeezing for more possible juice.

Where did that gold medallion tree come from? The crumpled tissue bears some resemblance to a Frank Geary building. With a friend’s suggestion I recently discovered Alice Munro's short stories. I had neglected persimmons all these years. This morning, I found a long-lost shirt in the back of my closet. And then there is Rufus Wainwright.

On the other hand, seeing the world fresh could be my astigmatic eyes. I’ve grown emotionally attached to my organs. I’m on good terms with my entrails and I don’t care to hear what nefarious plots they may be hatching. They are all out of warranty. My ears don’t hear like they used so I’ve come to their aid. My architecture has gone from no-nonsense-straight-up-Bauhaus to wavy Hundertwasser, from vertical to diagonal or so it seems.

I have vowed not to talk about Trump. I’m not going to speak of the steep decline in American society with its embrace of malice and imbecility. But I repeat myself. The imaginary candles I am blowing out on my imaginary cake do not signify the snuffing out of enlightenment. The election coming up is a plebiscite on the sanity of this country, to determine whether that substance of decency within still prevails.

If much of the tech world has passed me by, I am enjoying the bliss of unknowing. I am probably running out of gigabytes. Yet I have a grip on the enduring verities. For all the rest I rely on the kindness of strange young people who were born savvy having spent their embryonic months in a sea of umbilical apps.

I am so far out of the loop I don’t remember where the loop is. I could already be on a metaphoric ice floe. However, being unmoored offers a distant perch with an amplitude of vision. There is a temptation to measure the devolution, which I resist. I prefer to think that society has only taken on new forms I don’t recognize. 

I learned from Peggy not to rehearse bad news but that what if gene still shows up now and then. As always, love, friendship, creativity, caring and beauty are still at the center of my being. I hope to be still evolving. I aspire to poetic language not only as a way of saying but as a way of being with a certain sensibility.

I find myself giggling a lot. I laugh at myself searching for my car in a Costco parking lot. And I snicker at grown men on a basketball court running around in colored underwear. Carbonated holiness is what Anne Lamott called it. What could be more absurd than the spectacle of a certifiable sociopath out to destroy every shred of civility yet casting a spell over millions of us? So laughable it makes me cry but not enough to follow Socrates with a hemlock smoothie.

When I Google myself, I do not exist yet automatic doors open before me. I still have exclamation points to gasp about. And I still reflexively apologize when someone bumps into me in a crowded elevator. Giving that up shall be my birthday resolution.

 

Spring Song

Spring is like a perhaps hand, wrote e.e. cummings, 
arranging, rearranging…without breaking anything,
light and dark in vernal equipoise
yet unstill in the commotion of spring,
with all its myths rising from winter bondage
like soufflés released as in held breath
while the world teeters in a fool’s hands,
narcissus bulbs loud with blather foul the air
from high in the tower the potentate gloats

while those with illegal hands stoop below,
Truth shredded as confetti
to be dropped on 5^th Avenue snowing us
even as we are seeded then sprung
like those wild new-born poppies splattering
the desert floor of Anza-Borrego.
Fauvists at their outrageous easel
signify what Cummings called
the great illimitable earth.
There is a Yes after the final No,
an urgency that persists, a pod
opening here and there, March madness.
The number of red lanterns on the coral tree,
has doubled overnight to six,
startled this morning by the juicy pear
under the bruised green skin,

a cycle saving me from ever ending.

  

Silence

Hearts, they shrink

Pockets swell

Everybody know.

Nobody tell.              

                              Buffy St. Marie

 

Bad enough the noise. Incoherent blather.

Worse still, the loud silence

from those who know better but dare not utter.

One Repub. said he’d rather lunch with Hannibal Lecter

than attend the party retreat.

But still, but still, sealed lips in the chambers.

Congressional multitudes gone mute.

A high decibel hush can be heard.

Spines wither in silence.

American silence, same as German silence

of ninety years ago.

 

Poets, too, are silent, aghast,

having emptied their store of words.

Hoarse from pleas, obliquities on deaf ears.

I turn to the silence of fierce gusts,

to the wrath of a Biblical sky

and finally, to the silent spring

ready to burst on the desert dance floor.

Lincoln Boulevard

You are the north and south of us, 

the missionary's road, before colonized by cars,

old sins paved over for new ones,

Ugly as a mirror image, 

beautiful as a Rauschenberg collage.

Lincoln, the emancipated street conceived in liberty 

and dedicated to vehicles.

Showrooms, Sig Alerts and junkyards,

Motors are revved and the yogurt is frozen.

Quick Lube, fast food, strip malls are naked,

palmists, paychecks cashed and graffiti.

This is Americana where nobody walks. 

Is that you, Walt Whitman listening hard 

for bumper stickers singing? 

O Captain, my Captain, turn away; 

sprigs of lilac no longer bloom. 

We’ve emptied the wetlands in your name 

and filled the open road with bumpers of chrome. 

Lincoln, you are a gasoline alley 

and your thick air is exhausted,

part funeral procession. part parade.

Yet, some still lean and loaf at their ease. 

Surfers and surgeons mingle at the Cock & Bull saloon. 

A Suit stops a street vendor for a bouquet of roses. 

The Uber driver keeps a screenplay under his seat.

(Construction ahead- one lane)

Where the created equal eat 

sushi and salsa, 

pad thai and pastrami. 

Here is our body electric, 

neon diners and 

all-night laundromats, 

Pollock’s drip and 

Ginsburg’s Howl, 

clear as a dusted frappuccino.

We're here at LAX, 

to disappear

into thin air.

We've made good time 

on our way to elsewhere. 

Imagined Places

My brother was an only child till I ruined everything. He never quite forgave me for having been born. I'm told he had an imaginary friend he called Borneo. I’m not sure if Borneo was a stuffed animal or a place to hide in which case Arthur was way ahead of his time.

He was born two months before the market crashed in 1929. Maybe he got blamed for that. The Depression became his depression, whereas I swam into this world two weeks after FDR was inaugurated and got credited for that.

When war broke out, he was already at war with himself, defenseless against the artillery of life.  I grew up driving Nazis from Stalingrad and the Allied forces advancing across the front page of the New York Times.

When I was about thirteen, plus or minus, my friend Stanley and I invented a country we called Abaldabia. It was our Borneo. We picked an island, from the spinning globe, off the Siberian coast. What where we thinking? That’s where dissidents were sent to disappear yet we probably imagined some Gulf Stream current to make it tropical.

By that time Arthur was stationed in Korea. Not so far from Borneo. He returned still feeling ill-equipped. Suddenly I became four years his elder. Perhaps I could impersonate an adult better than him.

Abaldabia is now my secret room, my sanctuary. From a spot on the map I brought it to my inscape. I've become fluent in the lost language of imagined places. My passport to poetry, not for hiding but for launching.

Arthur was never at home in this world. Did he see Borneo when he drove his car into the side of a mountain at age thirty-three? Perhaps he was telling us that it was of Eden he was dreaming all along.

                                                                                               

Richard the Third

Having just watched the movie The Lost King, I was reminded of this blog I wrote in  2013. The film depicts the heroic work of a woman who had reason to believe Richard was buried under a parking area in Leicester, U.K. and, when shown to be correct, how the academics and politicians took all the credit. The King's remains proved he was maligned by Shakespeare reminding us that the Bard wrote at the pleasure of the Tudor Queen Elizabeth. Art is not to be taken as history. 

Speaking for Richard..........

Better potter’s field than these five centuries under a parking lot. Ignominy was my lot in life and death. But now my bones are free for all to see. No twisted, withered arm, my back less hunched or humped into a mountain as Will Shakespeare had it, no unequal, limping legs, just a curved spine and shoulders asymmetric. Bad ink has maligned me and stained my fate on folio pages.

Elizabeth called me that foule hunch-backt toade so her father’s thirst for severed heads would not suffer by comparison. As if my misshapen form had misshaped my deeds. They did worse than erase my name. One had me retained in the womb for two years. Another born too soon, unfinished, sent into this breathing world, scarce half made up… to disproportion me in every part. In death from Bosworth Field they stripped my body and dragged me to display. In the history books it is written that my body was despoyled to the skyne, and nothynge left above, not so muche as a clowte to cover hys pryve members . . . trussed . . . lyke a hogge or calfe.

But did I not hear the peasants jeer at their cursed act? I tell you I was loved in the forests and the fields, everywhere outside the court. Yes, yes I clawed my way to the throne. Treachery was in the air. But did I not ride to battle with the crown on my head? In my bones, from under cars and concrete I have been a student of the kings. Take note: I was the last monarch to die alongside his men. No Tudor lackey can re-write my bravery and the kingdom which but for a horse was mine. Nor can the chronicle deny I initiated bail to those accused, a beneficence which lives on forevermore. Is this the act of a usurper? Remember, history is merely the victor’s version.

Let this be their winter of discontent, while my grievances against the Bard’s mighty pen are redressed. If my visage seemed fierce and I chewed my lower lip, as reported, it may have been in compensation for my shortened frame. Yet it did not diminish the rage required to orate my call for peace between England and the Scots.

Let it be known that my first act as king was to ensure that the law of the land be administered fairly to all regardless of property or means. I allowed for petitions of the poor and set up legal aid for them in a Court of Requests, later abolished by my successor, Henry VII. Furthermore, during my mere two-year reign, I protected our merchants by prohibiting the importation of goods from abroad, exempting books which I encouraged for my people. Laws, henceforth, would be written in the common tongue, by my decree. During my reign sufficient benefits accrued to the populace, to generate an industry of defamation to my name by the opposition.

From inside my subterranean tomb I have heard spoken scurrilous attacks that besmirch public servants even in this enlightened age. Deceit got ennobled in a master’s hand during my day. Today it just requires repetition.

Hear my pleas. Yet shall my good name be restored. I feel it in my bones.

About Dry Grasses

Six of us went to see the latest film by the preeminent Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan. The movie is called About Dry Grasses. The grass doesn’t show itself till about the three-hour mark in this three-hour seventeen-minute narrative. Until then snow covers the screen and also swallows some of the subtitles. But I am not complaining.

All six of us were enthralled by the stark landscape against which the main character was shown to be sweet, artistic, mean-spirited and duplicitous, by turns. Just when you might feel for him, he would betray your trust and then you might get a glimpse of another dimension in his character.

He is a modern-day Ulysses, pragmatic, amoral yet achieving a certain humanity as he struggles for transcendence. He perseveres like my orchid which has died three times and is now fighting for another rebirth.

Like Ulysses, he is a man of many turnings. I came away thinking he is a self-deprecating version of the director / writer himself. At several points we see the still photography of the protagonist which is clearly the artwork of Ceylan. He is telling us not to demand purity. The multitudes within are struggling to survive. As Tarzan said to Jane, It’s a jungle out there.

My orchid has a tongue. It speaks fluent orchid. I see it wagging, reminding me about her three weekly ice cubes to quench the parched roots. The dry grass speaks to us of Nature’s cycles. Petals drop or get buried under permafrost but thaw and regenerate like the human spirit. At one point we too might seem desiccated with despair, then buds appear.

Over enchiladas, guacamole and strip steak we six agreed with ourselves, far from the Anatolian winter. Conversation flowed from the spring we contain wetting our meadow of dry grass.

Norman Conquest

In the year 2066, a mere 42 years from now while most of us are enjoying our next incarnation as butterfly, butter lettuce or butter pecan ice cream, it will be the 1000^th anniversary of the Norman Conquest. I intend to celebrate the occasion regardless of what shape I’m in. As invasions go, this one was momentous and not altogether destructive. I’m particularly pleased about that since they did it in my name. 

150 years before that, the French were ruled by Charles the Simple, who evidently earned his title. He accepted a horde of Vikings to occupy and protect a section of northern France which came to be known as Normandy (Norse Men). Thus was Norman born. I just took a bow.

It was on an October Thursday. William, not yet the Conqueror set sail from northern France with a gaggle of wine-soaked men to defeat the more pixelated forces of Harold at the Battle of Hastings. This is where Michael Kitchen presides as Inspector Foyle. He might have sniffed out the plot and defended the sacred shores but, like most European wars, this was simply a family squabble, not to be denied.

Normandy Bill, with some familial ties, was promised the crown by Ed the Confessor of England, who inconveniently died and Harold, his brother-in-law would have nothing of it. His throne was also being challenged from the north by the ruler of Norway. These were the days when Europe’s monarchs were at each other’s throats, unlike today when everyone loves everyone else, except for you-know-who.    

It might also have been a food-fight in which French toast got the better of English muffins and the result was eggs Benedict. The Normans had made better dishes to set before the king and so they did. Thousands came over to occupy British soil. They not only brought their latest recipes for technology in the form of weaponry; they also brought new notions of society, government and their mellifluous tongues. Mingling took place with the romance language of the Normans marrying the more guttural Anglo-Saxon speech of the Brits. The result was a most profound effect in the evolution of language, with the eventual meshing of Latinate and Germanic we now call English and speak, for better or worse. 

At first only the court, administration and elite spoke French while peasants stayed with their old Saxon words. Over time the one trickled down and the other met it and merged. The word, government, itself, traveled the channel in the period known as Middle English.

After a three-hundred-year orgy the new vocabulary became the common tongue. The old Brit words tend to be truncated and hard-edged while the French were often polysyllabic and lyrical. Those four-legged creatures in the pasture, sheep and cow, became French on the plate, mouton and chateaubriand or filet mignon. It is estimated that 10,000 French words have been folded into the English language. In that sense we Anglo-Americans are multilingual and all because of some Normans who came and never left.

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Bequeathed

I never knew my grandfathers and I presume they didn’t know me. I didn’t know me either.  However, over time I’ve gotten to make my acquaintance. It may have helped if I had the benefit of spending some time with my father’s father.  

Therefore, I have had to invent him and imagine how my dad carried himself with such an aura of equanimity, unruffled temperament and full presence after a childhood of near destitution. He earned money selling newspapers on street corners and was a runner, dashing from the single phone in the candy store to summon a tenant in a four-story walk-up. He made Oliver Twist seem real and never even asked for more.  

I don’t think he ever read a book. Dyslexic perhaps. I say this because we had no books in the house. Newspapers and magazines were stacked up, scrupulously unread by him. Yet he managed to get licensed after two years at Columbia College of Pharmacy, tutored all the way by my mother.

In the 1920s, drugstores thrived largely due to Prohibition. Four ounces of ethyl alcohol was dispensed for medical purposes, of course. I was born when breadlines were the headlines but there was no dust in my bowl of Wheaties.

My father emanated an equipoise. It was as if any piece of menacing news was balanced on his inner torsion scale with slivers of goodness. If I found myself overmatched by the mean streets, he pacified my world.

My grandfather, Louis, must have fled the pogrom singing folk songs or, at least, humming them as he hid under a pile of potatoes. As he made his way onto steerage, did he remember fiddling on the roof and imagining himself a rich man? When the ship pulled into New York harbor maybe he saw pages of Torah in the sky while others saw seagulls.  

Louis passed my father along to be raised by his sister-in-law after my grandmother died. My father was three years-old but he had the DNA to feel comfortable in his skin. He later played the mandolin in a small band, a resource of music and the sun brought from the shtetl.

My daughter Lauren just suggested to me that I may have this all wrong. It could have been my grandmother Annie whose extraordinary genes of centeredness and nurturing survived another day in my father. 

Routines

Ain't misbehaving this morning. I rubbed the anti-inflammatory Diclofenac gel into my bad knee, cycled for fifteen minutes on the stationary bike and then did floor exercises to build up the musculature below and above the arthritic knee. Yes, I’m advertising myself as a model nonagenarian.  But don’t get the wrong idea.

This is rare. I am usually loath to disturb my routine of creative lassitude. I think about going on the bike but I’m told that doesn’t count. And the thought of enduring exercise with short term pain and no immediate benefit never had much allure.

The key word is routine. I can’t think of any ritualized behavior I have adapted since I started brushing my teeth. The well-ordered life is a transient state. Bring me a modicum of disarray. Something unexpected is likely to emerge. I might even return to my bike.

Habit is the thief of meaning, so said some sage. The sameness of daily activities in the same sequence robs one of creative vitality. First this and then that feels prescribed to me. I want the next act to grow organically out of the small chaos called life.   

I gladly make room for digressions. On my way to the kitchen I spotted a pair of scissors which reminded me of cut flowers and how they sprung to life listening to the music of Dave Brubeck and his signature song, Take Five, written by Paul Desmond.

Constancy, it seems to me, is an illusion and tradition the illusion of permanence. To be alive is to be in the act of. And that includes ample time for in-dwelling. As Wendell Berry reminds us it is when the stream is impeded that the real work begins. It is in this debris of life we live and we make something of it.  

I am aware that some of my favorite people cherish their rituals. I respect their discipline and honor the meaning it has for them. I almost envy them. Yet at the same time I know it is not my path up the mountain. 

Am I going through life winging it? I like the idea of having wings but I don't think so. I sense an inner order with its own clock, values, resistance, creative bursts and baggage along with my heart's chamber music. And all of it, I would like to think, is ever evolving,

Let it be known I left this page after the fourth paragraph and pedaled from Patagonia to Prudhoe Bay on my stationary bike. It only took me 15 minutes.

How Tru, How Tru

 Too bad Harry isn’t around to speak to Donald. One was a …man, the other an…mp. A Tru-MAN, the other a Tru-(I)MP.

Yes, I do love words. To stretch, pulverize and then dissect them to see what may be hiding inside. So here is the Imp writ-large, a demon or goblin noted for wild and uncontrollable behavior. He doesn’t qualify to be an ump. That would entail fairness and mediation between factions but he is already a faction, the guy who has moved the goalposts.

Both the 33rd and 45^th president assumed the office at momentous times. The former presided over the beginning of post-war America. By any measure it was a new epoch. Our 45^th POTUS seems to be ending that seventy-year period of America as a beacon, a defender of Europe through alliances and a promoter of free-trade agreements.

To the admiration of their constituencies, both men were elected because they said it as it is. Harry spoke in short, clipped phrases. He was a citizen of the heartland, a plain-spoken man without rhetorical flourishes. The buck stopped with him. When his time was up in the oval office he simply got on a train at Union Station and rode, by himself, back home to Missouri. What you saw was what you got. Unlike the Imp.

Donald ventriloquized disgruntled Americans, particularly from the Rust Belt, orated in conversational style with locker-room vulgarities, schoolyard slander and a vocabulary of a twelve-year old. He stoked fear and long-simmering hatreds while all the time gloating as a celebrity. Truman lived with his famously insufferable mother-in-law in a small town. Trump lived on top of his tower in Big Town.

HST was a quick learner. He had to be after being sent into the next room by FDR which rendered him out of the loop regarding the Manhattan A-bomb Project and all matters pertaining to meetings with heads-of-state at Yalta and other summits. His load was the heaviest of any president. Twenty-five days after taking office Germany surrendered ending the war in Europe. Two months after that he met at Potsdam with Atlee and Stalin and weeks later made the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the war in the Pacific.

I cannot imagine our Imp presiding over the carnage and restoration of order in the world, with millions of refugees and displaced persons seeking asylum, returning G.Is looking to the government for educational opportunities along with labor unrest, segregated armed forces and the transition to a peacetime economy.

When I was fifteen the 1948 election campaign was underway. I was a staunch supporter of Henry Wallace, the Progressive party candidate. Unlike other kids doing normal things like stealing candy from Woolworths or sniffing airplane glue I was scurrying from floor to floor in every apartment building for blocks at-a-time distributing political material attacking both Truman and Dewey. Forgive me, I was living in an idealized world built on peace and justice. We had Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger to sing ourselves to an imagined place. Truman, of course, prevailed beating Dewey and also trouncing all that truth I had slipped under doors which went unheeded.

Looking back I have a greater admiration for Truman. He had to emerge from Roosevelt’s long shadow and he did, steering the nation through a troubling period. There are several areas where he fell short but compared to our new president he shines with a bright and true light.

One TRU stood for truth and trust and the other for trumpery and truancy, truculent...and the waste of a trumpet.