Bench note

The fountain is burbling.

I am thinking immaterial thoughts.

Without you, my joy remains intangible.

And so I have left unspoken words

unattached to the underside of this 

park bench -

just in case you sit here one day

and the fountain is burbling.

More than a chance of rain

I was going to mow my lawn this morning. The grass was green and getting tall. And then it began to rain. A good soaker with occasional thunder.

There were a few dishes next to the sink to do. More in the drying rack from last night to put away.

Instead, I took a black and white umbrella from the back porch, and stepped out into the rain in my bare feet. My pant legs would get wet, but what did I care about that? The grass was green and wet. The water was warm, rushing over my toes in the gutter as I crossed 15^th street. Jogging across the football field at Central Middle School was like splashing my white bare feet across a well-soaked dark green sponge. I nearly had the world to myself.

But then I encountered one other person as I walked. She was twisting a shirt or a towel or something to squeeze the rainwater out of it as she stood on the sidewalk near Central in the pouring rain. A  bicycle, a stuffed day pack, and a small wet dog were near her bare feet.

I said something about the weather. She said something about not wishing for things you didn’t want to get – she had been hot and smelly just yesterday. Today she was getting a shower.

I suppose that I could jump to a conclusion, here. I mean, just around the corner, there was enough space by the front doors of the school for her to get a little shelter. Or a few blocks over at Dillons, there was an overhang where she could get out of the rain. Even a public restroom inside.

But maybe she wouldn’t want to leave her dog outside alone. She told me he was eight years old as I crouched under my umbrella to scratch his wet back. So he would always just be a little dog. Or maybe, as the rain came raining down, for this woman standing in the rain – not too old, not too young - it made the most sense for her just to wait for the rain to stop.

I asked her somewhat euphemistically if she was travelling. She looked me with her wet face and dark eyes and said that she was taking a walk.

We exchanged a few words and a look or two. She said something about forty days. I said ‘take care.’ I walked away from the woman and her dog in the rain.

I don’t think that my words were enough, but I suppose we would have needed to know each other quite a bit better for either of us to do much more. We were strangers meeting on a corner in the middle of a rainy summer morning.

But, still, her feet were bare like mine. We were walking. I did have an umbrella and still my pants were half soaked. I put on a dry pair when I got home.

**

It’s an hour later and I’ve been making some notes on my laptop. It’s still sprinkling outside and it looks like more rain to come. I suppose I’ll put away yesterday’s dishes. Maybe tomorrow I’ll mow the lawn. With all of the rain we’ve been having, the grass is green and getting taller.

Happy birthday to me

Yesterday evening, you and I ate out at Mexquizito,

we shared a plate of nachos,

bowls of red chili sauce and green tomatillo sauce on the side.

And you shared some of your shrimp in creamy poblano sauce with me

and I shared with you some of my birria,

the pork stewed to succulent perfection in chilies and spices and such.

And then in the middle of the night

I turned sixty and by morning

it had started to snow.

But then you made French toast and bacon,

the maple syrup so sweet from a tree.

And then the sun came out

and the snow melted away.

Who am I?

And how did I get such a big nose?

And what will we eat for supper tonight?

If I live to be a hundred,

I’ll have German chocolate cake

and a piece of coconut cream pie on the same plate.

And if I don’t make it that far,

I’ll have a red Thai curry and sticky rice with mango.

And I’ll still probably have pie or a chocolate chip cookie.

And you’ll come a waltzing Matilda with me.

If it wasn't for Emily

This is a kind of podcast. That is, if you are interested, you can follow this link to YouTube and listen to about ten minutes of a recording of a few of my collected thoughts on the meaning of life while you make a sandwich or something. In the old days, we would have just sat together under the stars, maybe with something to drink. These days are still quite new but Google hasn’t answered all of my questions. Comments are appreciated.

Link to YouTube: If it wasn't for Emily - A ramble of about ten minutes. The credits will scroll on your screen at the end - or they are copied below. 

Credits:

Emily – for the question

Steven Wright – for the non sequiturs

Copernicus – for the observations and doing the math

Paul Simon – for 'I know what I know' and other good songs

Douglas Adams – for making fun of Life, the Universe, and Everything

Wendell Berry – for saying this:  “Praise ignorance. For what man has not encountered he has not destroyed.” 

Guttenberg – the Apple of his day

Paper

The oral tradition

Ginny, Sidra, Erin, Dawn and Evelyn (my mom) – for their respective generations of women

And countless baristas - and all of the other women who have smiled at me – fortuitously

Men – for a few extras

The earth

And Google

Some Mystery is involved

A Sunday afternoon on Mt. Oread

As I was walking away from Memorial Stadium,

watching the faces of families walking along together,

a car stopped at the intersection so that I could cross.

I turned my head and saw someone

leaning her head out of the back window,

talking into a hand held device.

I’ll say that she was a woman.

I’ll say that she was young.

I’ll say that her hair was black

and long and shiny

like the car

and her gown -

the satiny sleeve fluttering

and her hair tangling.

She said,

‘We’re headed your way,’

but I couldn’t hear her voice

or read her lips.

But it’s so easy to read people’s minds

on graduation day.

I wished her ‘good luck,’

as she rode on past me.

But the voice she heard wasn’t mine.

And it would be another older man who would later

hold her in his arms for a moment

and then let her go on. 

The mad poet's stump speech or ...

If you elect me to be your next president,

the chickens will finally come home to roost

and there will be poetry in every pot.

I will guarantee that there will be free

verse from pre-school through university

and a state-supported poet

in every coffee shop in the land.

The bankers will scribble nonsense on cardboard signs

and the generals will tiddleywink their medals on street corners

and rhyme and reason will finally and forever rule

And then comes the screech of tires

and a needle scratching across vinyl grooves

and the chalkboard chalk breaks into two, too.

If nominated, I will not run;

If elected, I shall not serve.

I choose poetry, not more volume.

Poetry is in the cracks, the spaces between things, the silence within the sounds. Poetry is the mystery that surrounds the tangible. Poetry lives in our imaginations or not at all.

We human beings should look for beauty, for wonder – and for love. Even that chicken in the pot and a carrot in the stew are more than protein and vitamins and a little salt - more or less. Our politics is hollow. So much empty talk. And are we, fellow citizens, becoming husks?

These, too, are just more words, after all. Measure them against your own perspective on reality. But it is hard to find anyone who thinks our politics are healthy. And almost no one reads poetry. This is only a correlation, but of course, cause has not been established.

I will vote in November for the better or against the lesser of the candidates running for office. I look elsewhere for poetry.

Let me begin again:

I was nearly half-way back across the Kaw River Bridge when I saw the bald eagle descending from a perch in the tree near the Bowersock South Powerplant. As it approached the surface of the river, talons were extended. How far ahead must that eagle have been tracking? It skimmed the surface, dipped and came up empty. The eagle turned and flew off downstream, low over the water relative to the sky, slow beats of wing, but steady. I followed the white spot of its tail as it passed in front of the blur of reddish-brown bare branches on the far side of the river. Then ascending gradually, the eagle passed in front of a fuzzy patch of bare gray branches heading towards the gray-white sky. The sun’s light was diffused through clouds and some scattered rain drops.

At that moment, a flock of seagulls appeared from downstream. Let’s say that there were fifty, but they were merely of a feather, aware of each other, flying together. Not in tight formation, but staying close. I lost sight of the eagle in the flapping of gull wings, the eagle apparently on its own course down steam. The gulls all turned and flew up and across the river, passing over the riverfront building and heading over downtown Lawrence.

I was left, with a few pigeons perched, facing into the breeze, on the cable arcing slightly downward over the dam that spanned the river. I was leaning slightly against the railing, watching the water flow down towards the Missouri, then the Mississippi River, and on out to the sea.

The apparently endless repetition of rainfall, river, evaporation because of the energy of the sun, the spinning earth and cycling winds, and then rainfall again upstream – it all had a beginning and moves toward an end. At least, that’s my perspective.

I recall the words of Heraclitus yet one more time. No one steps into the same river twice. What I have witnessed today didn’t have to be as it was and it will not repeat exactly this way again. And I am grateful to have been alive at this place and at this time. Somehow what I have seen  strikes me as beautiful – and that I care about being a small part of everything.

Everything has always been beyond my reach, but I look out anyway. What I can touch with my eyes and my other senses is my home. Me, standing at this railing on this bridge is my time and place, for now, only.

Songs and poems tie these things together. What we know is always relative to something else. The beat of the eagle’s wings is about the same as the beating of my own heart. My heart and my brain are organs of flesh and blood of about the same size. That is, they are about the size of my hand. Which is about the weight of a seagull. And then, not infinitely smaller, but tiny, the neurons inside my brain turn and fly across a patch of brain, conveying part of a message that my mind’s eye can read. Yet together, this all seems to mean something that I find beautiful.

One old song counts by hundreds: Lord, I’m one, lord I’m two, lord I’m three, lord I’m four, lord I’m five hundred miles away from home. If that tune is in your brain, you are hearing it with me. Turning, flying across.

Or Mr. Frost pauses on a snowing evening and has miles to go before he sleeps. And Mr. Eliot repeats: “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo.” Or Annie Dillard says this in her essay about the present: “You do not run down the present, pursue it with baited hooks and nets. You wait for it, empty-handed, and you are filled.”

Each time is the only time, and I believe that poetry ties the times together. Sometimes we can get something down in words, often we only feel that the poetry is there. From one perspective, the river is only very many molecules of hydrogen with two oxygens attached. Countless, but finite numbers of them, flowing by gravity’s law. And add an eagle. Some number of gulls flying in a flock. A man from the species, homo sapiens, standing on a bridge.

And one day, as the planet spins, twirling around the sun, that star, in its death throes will lick out a tongue of flame and dry up every bit of moisture on earth, leaving a cinder. And, perhaps, someone will be standing on a bridge on a distant planet, looking up at the night sky and see a spot of white and think very nearly the same thought that I thought I just thought. How beautiful it is - and to be a part of this, now.

And then I turned and finished crossing the bridge. I saw faces along the sidewalks that I could not identify as I walked on towards faces that would smile into mine. What is the distance of recognition? And each time I catch a glance of that feeling that I’m so very close to home, it is the same and different. That’s time.

Strawberry Question

In the middle of the night,

I bit into a strawberry

that was in a bowl

in the refrigerator.

It tasted different

than the one I ate

earlier in the day -

sweeter, juicier.

The strawberries

couldn’t have been different,

it must have been me.

I ate another one.

Then another one.

I emptied the bowl.

What if everything is like that?