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?

To Trevor and whomever it may concern

The glass I regularly drink iced tea in

at my regular coffee shop is broken.

Not like the resilient planet we live on –

it’s just the people here that are half-cracked.

Plastic is what we think we can rely on

as if there were no tomorrow.

And now today is more disposable than yesterday.

Oh, I know that it’s craziness to think

that there is literally a last straw

and that just one more disposable

plastic glass will break the planet’s back.

But it’s even crazier still to think that every little thing

that we do or don’t do doesn’t matter.

If you add up and compound every

inconsequentiality and then you finally end up with nothing –

or at least nothing of any consequence,

then we all are certainly entirely too crazy to live on this planet –

anyway.

So I sat down on the sunlit sidewalk

and drew a round nearly round sun

with pointy rays in bright chalky hot pink chalk

for a little girl that I know only just a little.

She told me that the sun was supposed

to be yellow and of course she was and is right

and she is, of course, less cracked because she is so much younger

and so much more innocent than my old and negligent self.

I said that maybe it could be a flower and I drew

a long purple stem winding away from one side.

Only then it looked more like a kite or a prickly balloon

and so I added two three-toed pink feet

to the end of the purple strand and by then

it wasn’t clear what we had

besides a lot of colored chalk on the sidewalk.

And so I drew a single green eye

in the middle of the slightly sun-warmed pink circle

with curling green lashes

not unlike lashes so many little girls do have

but not necessarily green - and then I told

the little girl that it was a microscopic sea creature.

And do you know what?

The little girl smiled at me.

Who knows what she was thinking? – Indeed!

I like to think that I’m only half-crazy,

but I hope it’s the good half

of this crazy little thing that matters.

It might be love or it might be the deep blue sea.

Not everything matters as much

as the next thing, but if we are unable to pretend

that some choices matter a little

and that sometimes,

with a little help from our friends,

some choices might indeed add up to a life

worth living – well then …

You can call me crazy if you want to,

but if iced tea in plastic glasses is sanity,

I would rather make chalk drawings for little girls.

And maybe one day we will all wash away

in the very last rain that a human eye will ever see.

Or maybe, as her mother drove off the asphalt

in their dusty fossil fueled van into unseen exhaust,

that little girl powered down her window

and she merely called out to me ‘I’m your future.’

Or maybe she really just shouted ‘good-bye’ to me

and I merely called back to her to ‘have a good day.’  

Or maybe I wished her ‘a good life.’

Whatever I said really didn’t much matter –

after all.

You know, the climate didn’t change

very much on that blue sky morning -

but it was nevertheless her smile that mattered

and it is that little green eyelash of a girl that still does –

to me.

So if I have a choice, I’ll drink iced tea

from a glass glass,

even if it doesn’t do the planet

any particular good -

and maybe – just perhaps –

little things matter.