Coming and going

The sky is reflected in the River

Bert Haverkate-Ens

Some time when I walk

across the Kaw River Bridge

the sky is reflected in the river.

Some time it is only the sky

reflected in the river.

Words and poetry do not fail me -

they are simply not enough.

They neither start

what I have to say,

nor do they finish.

They are a snag

to hold on to

for a moment

for my mind to catch

a breath

as the river draws

my body ever downstream.

Youtube ~ 1 min.

Inukshuk by the Kaw

If a story has a beginning, middle and end, can a walk be a story?

John and I were walking along the levee on a sunny, not-too-cold, morning in December. We turned to take a steep, rough path down to the river. We had to watch our footing. The gravel was loose. Then we stepped onto a bar of soil and rock and through the weeds where a path had been worn. We kept to the path. Our way soon opened up to the river flowing by and a cairn appeared near the water. John called it an inukshuk, an Inuit word for cairn that means a stone man who points the way.

This man had been built only up to a lower torso of several stones on a large, flat stone joining two squat legs. If we had bent down in the right places, we could have looked through the legs of the inukshuk to cairns that had been built out in the river in shallow water.

The north unit of the Bowersock Hydroelectric Powerplant loomed to our right. Its concrete and steel legs spanned four openings. In each opening, a metal shaft could be seen connecting the turbine down below up to the generator in the building above.

But we were heading downstream. We talked as we went. The river ran somewhat low off to our right, keeping pace with the seasons. If it raised questions, we were not really answering the river. John and I were talking to each other. But we paused now and then.

In not too far, the walking ground became sloped and more difficult and we slowly picked our way back up and across the large irregular limestone boulders to the top of the levee. ‘Good for the heart and the legs,’ John said. ‘Good for the mind,’ I said. We had to be careful of our how we placed our feet on uneven surfaces, keeping our balance over small chasms in which a misstep would have put us at least knee-deep in limestone with a twisted ankle, perhaps.

We continued walking downriver along the top of the levee. Again we came to where a rough gravel path had been laid down the side of the levee. We took it.

This time we came to sandbar hugging the northern bank of the Kaw. The clean sand extended downriver, its surface rippled into moguls, spaced hills of sand as if the river, when running higher, had scooped holes a foot or so deep, depositing the sand on top of regular but a still haphazard patterns of hills. The slopes and surfaces were smooth, the sand soft under our feet. There were tracks. Animal and human.

And then as we walked farther downriver, we saw paths of lines several feet wide running all the way from the scrub wood bank at the base of the levee to the water’s edge. The scratchings seemed not naturally made, but we walked over one combed path after another. I picked up a stalk of a brushy stick, and drew a squiggle in the sand. It seemed similar. But who would have drawn so very many brush strokes from one edge of the sandbar to the other?

Then again, when we had walked as far as we could unless we could have managed the miracle of walking on the ripples of the river, we stopped and looked on to where the river continued running on toward a horizon. Those ripples were only inches high, but we would have quickly been knee-deep and much more had we tried walking on the water’s surface.

We turned and walked casually, keeping to the hills of sand as we could, until we found the path that would take us back to the top of the levee.

John and I turned back toward home. We had not been the first to walk along that way and we would likely not be the last. We had walked somewhere in the middle of a story.

Solstice lights

Green light. Red light. Stop.

 http://youtu.be/4E2BmeE3UrA

The solstice approaches. We don't need more light, we need to get smarter.

Gray river

Walking across the bridge, the river is gray. Clouds above. I've said it before, thought it a hundred times, the sky is reflected in the river, these words coming again like drizzle falling out of humid air. Only this time a sharp wind, hard out of the north, has rasped the surface.

What would Paul Hotvedt do? I thought. More to the point, what would any good painter see when they looked carefully at this river? What is at issue is not simply the color of the river, although it could start there, perhaps.

The world comes at me soft and sharp - or something. Not in words, but in sensations through my eyes and against my skin. My mind is matter – the scientists have probed and sliced the brain tissue, scanned it with radiation. No homunculus. Only chemicals and impulses. Neurotransmitters have been spotted leaping the synaptic clefts.

So my painter friend, I ask again, how would you paint the surface of this river? And where might I find the words? The river, as I looked downstream from the Kaw River Bridge on a winter day was gray, the surface rasped by the sharp north wind. Maybe one day I will do better. And so Mr. Hotvedt, how would you express it?

I think that the river knows what it cannot express in paint or words, but it does indeed reflect the sky.

Thanksgiving: A prayer

If you eat too much

today, will it be excess?

If tomorrow you have nothing,

will it be enough?

Thanks is for the givers,

for they will be filled

in their emptiness.

Juniper smoke

If the smoke gets

in your clothes

and your eyes keep

me warm

and the moon like ash

rises

into cold and careless

space

will the embers linger

longer

than our eyes will

remain open

or will our love

be like dying

in juniper smoke.

For David and Sarah

Tea Project - Lawrence Arts Center

Not everything goes together like tea and sugar.

A soldier back from Iraq served me hot tea

and sugar in a ceramic cup

where I sat,

the cups lined up on wooden racks

reminiscent of the Styrofoam cups

decorated by detainees in places

like Guantanamo.

He and others had made a cup

for every detainee,

he and others talked about

thousands or more, I was distracted

by girls in their dancing tights

slipping around and behind

and up the stairs to their class.

There was solitary and torture

and innocence, lost on me

as the afternoon sun came through tall windows

from behind me where I sat in the listening crowd

and me,watching the sunwashed white wall above.

I did not see the girl on the walkway

overhead, but then there came silently dancing

a shadow on that bright wall.

I lost count how many cups were mentioned,

one sat empty at the foot of my chair

still with a sip of tea and sugar gone cold.

Beauty or Coincidence?

I have a friend, younger than me. She made some flowers out of tree leaves. Somehow she spiraled the leaves together, putting them into a vase. She said that I could do it.

I begged off with an excuse of laziness, or something.

Then, yesterday, I needed to go the store and get a few things for supper. I took the long way – walking by way of Veteran’s Park near the high school. I crossed over 19^th street and was heading down 20^th when I saw the most amazing tree. It was almost entirely bright yellow, holding on to nearly all of its leaves. Of course, I believe in coincidences – they happen. My friend lives just a half block to the north on Vermont and I thought to myself, maybe I could make a leaf flower.

I began picking leaves. Their stems let go with a slight tug. I kept the stems together, leaves flat together like the pages of a book. I began with yellow, then I saw some leaves just turning red, and then, I saw some with bright green still in them. It was the yellow that made the green seem so bright, I think.

I carried my sheaf of leaves with me, carefully holding them together. I cradled some cans of pineapple and also a dozen eggs in one arm as I wandered through the aisles at Dillons, shifting things around carefully so I could get to my wallet to pay.

I sat for a moment on a ledge outside, watching the people come and go. Then I headed home with my bag in one hand, the leaves in the other. A neighbor waved at me from their house a block from my house and I crossed the street. She and her daughters were reading on a blanket on the grass. I saw colored leaves printed on the open pages of a picture book. The mother said that a cold front was coming. It was indeed quite warm for November. I showed them my leaves and then continued toward home. It was time to get supper started.

Then, just before I got to our house, another neighbor was coming towards me on the sidewalk, kicking though the leaves with her two daughters and her two dogs. We stopped and I explained that I was going to try to make a flower with the leaves in my hand.

One daughter told me that then I was going to give it to my wife because I love her. Well, she would know.

I set my bag in the kitchen and did the flower first. A wine glass wasn’t quite right, the mouth too big. I found a narrow-stemmed juice bottle in the stairwell with the vases, the top opening  about the size of a penny. I stuck the stems of the leaves into the opening as I sat at the dining room table. I tried to swirl the leaves. Then I pulled them carefully back out, sticking back into the bottle a few leaves at a time – yellow in the center, a splash of the red, and the green around the outside.

It wasn’t as tightly spiraled as my friend’s flowers were, but it had a nice shape and I was pleased with how the colors came out. It was pretty enough for a picture and then the dining room table.

If you are wondering, I made sweet and sour pork, and I have to tell you that I used three farmer’s market bell peppers – one green, one red, and one in between green and red. The pineapple - from the can - was, was of course, bright yellow. Sweet and sour I had planned on.

My wife - who I love, as my very young friend reminded me - came home from work. I had heard the wind rising strongly from inside the house and I stepped out onto the front porch as Dawn was just getting out of a friend’s car. She pointed up at the leaves swirling in the air as she walked towards me. I saw them swirling against a graying sky.

I finished up in the kitchen and we sat at the table with the leaf flower and began eating at three minutes before six.

Why would I tell you all this? Surely the numbers and the colors don’t mean anything. There’s a coincidence here and there. And there are more beautiful leaves in the world than I have time to count. The leaf flower won’t last long.

Even the friends and neighbors are somewhat coincidental, too, although intention should be counted. And what if I had walked faster or slower? What if I had not rested, watching for a few minutes? What if all these amazing people had not wanted to talk with me? I did not make the elements of this story or order their occurrence by more than leaf or two. The afternoon mostly just happened as afternoons sometimes do.

I can still hear the north wind outside my window tonight – expected to be more than thirty degrees colder tomorrow for the high. Yesterday, I did something because I friend told me I could. I had some colors and a number of friends to work with. The initial question is yours.

My imagined love

I was walking down the sidewalk,

when I heard a woman’s voice,

she was riding up close behind me,

and then this is what she said:

‘On your right,’ her voice was soft,

and I stepped a half step left,

and just as she passed,

I said to her, ‘you’re all right.’

And then I saw her glance at me,

from behind her dark sunglasses

and then this is what she said to me,

‘You’re fine,’ I saw her sweet lips move.

And then she was away

as she became my new true love.

And now, and alas, then

she peddled out of my life...

Forever is such a short time,

but I couldn’t have loved her more,

had that single, tender moment

turned into aching year-long looks.

She was surely more than alright to me,

And as she told me from her bicycle seat,

I was fine to her.

Pumpkinhead

Pumpkinhead dummy No. 1 sat at the card table just off the sidewalk leading to the front porch. I, with my own pumpkinhead, sat a few giant steps back in the shadows. I moved forward and back throughout the evening, picking my times.

I was just standing behind dummy No. 1, when a smartly dressed woman walked by with a little girl in her Halloween costume and her candy bag in hand. Young daughter’s hand in her young  mother’s, to my eye. The woman turned back toward the two pumpkinheads and she saw me move when she was already on the steps. I saw her smile in the porch light and she called back to a guy out on the sidewalk. “You remember that guy that scared the shit out of me back when ...”

Another large group of parents and kids came up and I couldn’t follow all of them through my eye holes. Then the mother and daughter were standing just ten feet in front of me. The little girl, her head not even as high as my waist, let go of her mother’s hand and stepped boldly towards me.

I crouched to a knee, and pulled my mask away. We were eye to eye. I could have reached my huge hand out and touched her pretty red dress with the white polka dots. She wore matching ears perched on top of her brown hair. Her button of a nose was colored shiny black.

 “I’m a person,” I said, holding my pumpkin head to my heart.

She did this little girl thing where she half-shrugged her shoulders and tilted her head slightly to one side – and she just giggled.

I could have a stayed there looking into her face for the rest of my life, but it doesn’t work that way. After a few moments, in which she explained to me that she was Minnie Mouse, she turned and went back to her mother.

I put my mask back on and backed into the shadows.

I watched her walk down the sidewalk holding her mother’s hand, looking back at me over her shoulder. From that distance, I was little more than a shadow to her eyes. But will she tell her daughter about me one day?

Of course, I also scared or startled quite a lot of other kids tonight. A few mothers. You should have seen that one young woman suddenly turn, her mind and feet not quite her own for a few steps. And there was laughter. I really was something unexpected for a short time in their eyes when I played my part just right, variations on uncertainty all night long. I could see it in their painted faces and hear it in their excited voices. One not so little boy produced a terrific scream. And now there are memories of moments already receding into the shadows.

Two boys from up the street who had seen this show before, called dummy No. 1 ‘Bert’ and walked right up to him and poked him in his stuffed shirt. When I step out of the shadows, they turned and jumped into my monster arms.

As far as I know, I play the double dummy Halloween game as well as anybody. You wait, and you wait, they look carefully at dummy No. 1 - someone says, “He’s not real.” Then suddenly Pumpkinhead dummy No 2 takes two slow, halting steps toward someone or just barely gives a wave. I have a terrific audience.

But I would have sat out all night on this cold All Hallows Eve just to be a person for Minnie Mouse. For a moment, I was as good as I would ever be. And tomorrow I’ll try to be a person for somebody else.

Halloween 2011
Video/essay about the neighbor girls and Halloween wrtten in 2013