Fire

This is a story that has no discernible beginning. But it begins in fire.

My mind is amazing and unique, in a similar way that David’s dog, Milo, has an amazing and unique mind. And so, all of these minds have become ordinary and entirely common. Peculiar. The improbability that I exist springs to mind and I might dismiss it, but for the recollections.

It should not surprise you that the universe - call it reality, if you wish - enters into my mind, and then in the night, thoughts flame into existence as did the flickers of flames that sprang to life in a field near Pomona Lake where moments before there had been nothing but dry grass. Over and over I saw it happen that day in front of my unbelieving eyes, the head of a shovel, black against a blacker black, snuffing out flames the color, nearly, of the very sun. And then, at some measurable distance across a space of sere grasses and beginning green, another flame, ex nihilo.

Now, of course, I have a modern mind and I do not mean that there exist spirits in fire. Physics should be sufficient. So I must, perhaps, be something of a fool to even speak of these things in this way.

But this is what I know. In the day just past, I, and two friends, mounted a red chariot pulled by many strong horses and we drove to a place as mundane and unique on the face of the earth as you might imagine. We then futzed with other machines, with tools and water tanks, and after our preparations, we ramped screaming mechanical beasts over dry fields. Tom fired pile after pile of cut and dried honey locust wood with a roaring propane torch.

And following that, each one in its own blaze, a fire as ordinary and unique as all the rest burned fierce and hot - orange, growing, tinged with black smoke, swirling, roaring, reaching high into a perfect blue sky like an animal, a spirit, a tongue, licking at an inverted bowl a color so blue it was nearly blinding.

My senses, my very mind, took all this in, hour after hour. My gloved hands on the handle of my shovel, scraping earth and fire, the wind, a variable breeze, blowing across my ears on occasion like a sound check - but only when I noticed. My mind was alive. My body moved, repeating motions.

And then at the end of the day, we sat on a tailgate. I drank ice water. David dug at the earth to retrieve the bulbs of an early wild lily with the blade of his shovel that had recently seen fire.

And a few questions that have been asked as long as there have been human minds were asked and insufficiently answered.

We drove home. The sun, a glowing red ball of flame, settled on the horizon to our left as we sped along the highway. And then the earth tilted and day became night.

And so it is my experience that somehow some of these questions will fire up in the dry grass of my mind in the darkness. The answers elude me, but somehow, my mind senses that something means something.

Do I use words like a shovel, beating, cutting at the thoughts that spring to life, not with only a mind but some spirit of its own? These are the blunt and occasionally effective tools that I have at hand.

Billions of years ago there was fire. I believe that. And in the possible distant future, I assume there will be ice.

But yesterday was a day I walked in a breathing world, filling my mind with recollections.

And now, what appeared to be irrevocably in the past, fires again.

Perhaps I make too much of this. We burned brush. Tom and David and I ate and drank. Milo collected cockleburs. We humans talked. We had looked into fire.

Some mystery burns.

What creatures are these?

As I was walking across the bridge,

a great blue heron flew over ahead of me,

coming in for a landing.

Wings outstretched, neck crook’d, he glided over.

Then as he cleared the bridge,

that heron began to rapidly slip vertical lift.

He dropped a foot or more for every foot

he flew forward

for a hundred feet at least.

Within seconds the heron descended smoothly

from a height well above my head

to the surface of a shallow pool of water

well beneath my feet.

And then the heron stepped down

as lightly, nearly, as a feather,

and silently folded his wings against his body.

It all appeared as effortless as –

as me putting one foot in front of the other

as I walked across that bridge.

Now his species has been learning to fly

for millions of years.

And mine has been learning to appreciate

beauty and grace for millions as well.

But to actually do

the things we have evolved the capacity to do

within time and space

is something else entirely.

I walked on down the levee

and as I returned

the heron stood still where he had landed.

Surely he had already forgotten all about his masterful descent,

as he had in his flight matched without conscious thought

every feather and muscle

to the laws of gravity and aerodynamics –

that is, he flew with the elegance of

a great blue heron.

I will likely have forgotten it as well

in not too long,

but I managed to see this one heron

in a long line of herons

and for a moment

my wonder exceeded my reason.

As I headed home,

my mind flew over ahead of me

as I recrossed that bridge,

walking one foot in front of the other.

Rain on whose parade

We could talk about this or that,

or we could talk about the weather.

It seems to me not so inconsequential,

rather, the question is who the weather is consequential for.

If your nose is on the inside of the glass,

frozen numbers on the outside are merely talking points.

A dusting of snow or a foot changes the chance of a school closing,

the likelihood of sleds on nearby hills.

And will there be cold drizzle on your parade?

This year I jumped ahead of tradition and planted a few potatoes

on an 80 degree day two days ahead of St. Patrick’s Day.

This year lettuce and spinach seeds had to wait for late winter snows to clear.

With the weather more unpredictable,

gardening starts to feel like more gambling.

Today’s the parade.

The streets are packed with young and old

bundled up against the north wind.

I had to admire the young women

perched prettily upon the back seats of convertibles.

And I smiled at the startled look that crossed one smiling face

as her driver revved the engine and released the clutch

too quickly.

The big blue beer truck crept passed too slowly

and the big boys and girls club bus,

packed to the windows with noisy, waving kids,

could have driven more slowly for me.

And the girl scouts walking in their sashes,

looking for people they might know

on either side of the street.

And there was candy, too.

It began to sprinkle as I walked down the sidewalk

against the flow of the parade.

The bow of the S.S. Minnow was crashed on a desert isle

riding the back of a flatbed truck.

Multiple copies of Gilligan in red shirt and floppy white sailor’s hat

danced to amplified music.

Another flatbed carried musicians from the Americana Music Academy.

At the corners of a tarp, human tent poles tried to protect the instruments.

I heard fiddle music but couldn’t see a fiddler as they all crowded together.

A few blocks from my warm and dry house,

I came upon the end of the parade

still waiting to begin.

Have I mentioned anything of more consequence than the weather?

It depends on who you ask. 

At rest

A long line of white-breasted gulls faced the winter sun along a straight log come to rest in low water.

To leeward, although there was hardly a wind that mattered, a drift of leftover ice nudged against an isthmus of limestone.

On the far side, almost as many geese held their positions, headed into a bare current; a few turn for a moment for no apparent reason.

Then three geese take wing, dark-shaded wings, large, outstretched - but for a bare three beats they catch the air and then as quickly drop into the flotilla.

I’m only one, and I would count what I see, but let’s just say there are two dozen gulls and two dozen geese – and me on the bridge.

Still, the sun, low, barely warm at my back: how can they just wait there, watch there, so simply be there, wings tucked under?

Why not fly?

A poem is a pebble

Let’s be blunt about it. Poetry is as common as stone. More blunt: a poem is like a pebble I pick up on a gravelly shore. I put it in my pocket and carry it away. Maybe I’ll remember the way the sky was reflected in the river – or maybe I’ll remember something else – when I pull it out again.

Words are the grains of sand on the edge of the water. This is to say that they are not all alike. Apparent similarity is simply one attribute we notice. The grains of sand are mostly just very small from our perspective.

Do not be carried away by the metaphor. It is there only to carry you along.

Words are like the grains of sand in their ubiquity; they are only countless given our limited time frame and patience.

But a poem, let’s say, is more like a pebble, a small rock, in the sense that it is substantial enough to fit into our perspective and our time frame.

Do not be carried away by the metaphor. The metaphor is there to carry you.

The rock I pick up has distinguished itself, in my eye - perhaps in my eye alone. Some characteristic, some trait, managed to catch my eye.

Forget, for now, why that would be so. I will try to not lose my place, so you must try to maintain focus on this gravelly surface which is made up of concepts masquerading as solids.

Not to be carried away by the metaphor, but still, you must let words carry the meaning.

In all this rubble, my point is that a poem is a collection of words – it is a human-crafted thing – that is distinguishable from other collections of words that in some way initially the caught the poet’s eye and has perhaps been later caught by a reader (or hearer). It should however be noted that all sorts of poems will catch my eyes – they might even be rubies or sapphires, let us say - but those are not what this writing is all about.

This collection of words is about the poetry that exists in the space of our ordinary perspective in the time in which we are alive. These are stones with everyday distinguishing features that can serve as reminders of a place where we were, at a moment in time when we were alive and aware of some meaning in that particular time and place. That is, we might note the moment when we were aware of our existence and it meant something to us.

This goes back and forth. At times we are subject and at times we are object. At times it is about the reality of things and at times it is about the reality of our selves. And so this is has become tangled and takes us somewhat farther away from what I am trying to say. But see it, touch it, and then leave it lying on the beach.

Let’s bring this into my own experience, for example. When I collect my thoughts and compose them into a poem, I am providing for myself a piece of something, a record of who I was and where I was and when I was.

It becomes something I can put into my pocket. And later I can take it out and look at it again and remember, or at least try to remember.

How do we live unique, meaningful lives within an ubiquitous reality? If I say that poetry is a particular nuance of the more general idea of meaning, then a poem is a pebble. It solidifies the poetry around us. The poem is particular. It is a thing and things are what we can hold on to.

When I walk to the river, that is to the Kaw, by the route I usually take or perhaps more circuitously, reality seems from my perspective to be ubiquitous: colors, textures, sounds and faces - and sand and water and light and wind. And in my mind I would like to make reality seem more discrete, to make portions of the blur that I see all around me somewhat distinctive and to ascribe meaning that will allow me to preserve the sensation of being alive in that place and at that time.

Perhaps, as they say, this is all too abstract for words, but words are what I have chosen to use.

Some of the words I have put together on other pages convey things that are harder, more edged, but this particular collection of words reminds me more of the edge of the sandy shore where the water is just below the level of my feet, and what is solid and fluid meet at a surface that holds my weight yet shifts with every step.

All you can do is let the metaphors carry you.

Of course, my intent is to walk in reality, but meaning is registered in memory.

A poem is a pebble.

Counting Geese

The geese fly over

from the sandbar

to the shallow pool

at the base of the Bowersock hydroelectric plant.

The massive concrete and steel structure

rests idle,

due to the drought.

First, four fly across,

then another four,

that makes eight;

then after a short interval,

the remaining five –

thirteen.

Do geese drifting

on low water

count?

For all that,

can I fly?

I suppose there is room

on the river

for the fourteen of us.

But how many of their kind

would it take to screw in

the one more light bulb

that would blow the circuits

on their species forever?

How many of my kind?

Does anyone count

anymore?

Something must be going on, but I can hardly hear you now

“Easy,” he laughed, with a bit of a stumble into his cell phone. “I’ve got one more meeting until 5 o’clock and then I’m free.”

The young man paused outside the back door at Central Middle School in a T-shirt, long polyester athletic shorts over black leggings, and lime green shoes. Maybe a Phys. Ed teacher.

Shortly thereafter, with every bit of late afternoon winter sun still clinging to the mostly white trunk and branches of my casual friend Bill’s large sycamore tree, I walked through the alley toward South Park.

I easily had been imagining along the way that Mr. Lime Shoes had been talking to a young woman, impatient to see his face, his encouraging voice just not quite enough for her.

As I approached the gazebo, I saw a small group of students – four girls and a couple of boys – who had likely been just hanging out there on the deck, catching what remained of the sunlight.

To my puzzlement, an older African-American man, still young to my eyes, about Mr. Lime Shoes age, slight of frame, appeared to be lecturing them. The kids listened attentively. He was dressed casually, although that did not preclude him from being a teacher, but the skateboard he leaned against the railing suggested otherwise.

He wore an earring which flashed in the low-angled sun and a baseball cap. He used his arms with some vigor as he talked.

By this time, I was sitting on a metal bench across from the winter-silent Roosevelt Fountain and I could only hear bits of talking sounds over the more general hum of the passing cars on Mass Street.

One of the girls raised her hand as if she were in class. The man in the cap acknowledged her, and then shortly, she and two girl friends descended the steps of the gazebo.

The first girl, wearing a pink jacket, was talking into her cell phone – as I recall the phone had a kind of lime green sleeve around it, as if that means anything. The girls - young women, perhaps I should say, it’s hard for me to know anymore - approached the bench where I was taking notes about apparently anything.

No one but me seemed to notice.

Two of the girls walked on, and the one with the phone went back, up the steps of the gazebo, and rejoined the other listening kids.

After several minutes more, the man with the cap picked up his skateboard and left, halting partway down the sidewalk, as he was heading away from me, and then he, too, stopped and was talking to someone on his cell phone.

Now I don’t have a cell phone, and as you can see, I followed almost none of the actual conversations I observed. From where I sit, a nondescript older man, I can hear the swings squeaking from the playground on the other side of Mass.

Maybe I’ll wander over there and see what all that racket is all about.