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.