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.

Conversation in the rain

If it hadn’t been raining,

Charlie wouldn’t have been looking out from

under the awning of the rec building in South Park.

I walked up to him to compare forecasts

and he decided to share half of my tiny umbrella,

for several blocks –

not that it would do much good.

He’s a man a full generation older

and he steps lively in his thoughts.

And with our shoes quickly filling

as puddles filled sidewalks

and the surrounding lawns squished,

we walked with our ears occasionally close

half underneath my inadequate umbrella.

We hadn’t seen each other for awhile

and we each inquired about the other’s health

and then Charlie wanted to ask me about

a quote about existentialism

from a man named Krutch.

We paused under an awning at Footprints

so that he could consult a note from his shirt pocket.

Then we stepped out into the rain

and after some thought and more raindrops

I essentially had to agree:

Nature outside ourselves cannot be man’s source of meaning.

An existentialist must find meaning within.

Charlie said to me then that Wordsworth

was therefore refuted.

And after each of us jumped a couple of

gushing gutters he said

that then here was what Wordsworth had to say.

And he quoted me line after line

of a poem

for roughly a city block,

as we ducked under dripping tree branches

and splashed.

And when we turned at the light,

I had to admit then as well

that Wordsworth really wasn’t wrong.

Charlie laughed.

We were well soaked below our knees

and the rest of us was reasonably damp.

We parted at the corner of 17^th and New Hampshire,

each to change into drier clothes.

If it hadn’t been raining,

I wouldn’t have gotten wet.

Honk

I walked across the Kaw River Bridge. There was just a little water flowing over the dam – probably only hundreds of gallons a second. Several years ago, the wooden flashboards that held back the mill pond upstream of the Bowersock Hydropower Plant had been replaced with a series of massive concrete pylons and long inner tubes, the last of the four large tubes had nearly been fully inflated again after releasing the excess water from recent rains back along the Kaw River Watershed.

I paused to take a photo of the sun’s path on the water downstream. I walked on. The water under the bridge was almost the color of chocolate milk, the tops of the ripples catching the low morning sun’s rays and lightening the thin soil and water slurry.

The city around me always hums. A car would pass occasionally on the other side of the concrete barricade on the bridge at this early hour. Then I heard what sounded to me like a Canada Goose merely adding it’s honk into the growing cacophony of the day. But when I listened more closely, I thought I heard an echo. There was a honk, and then a half-beat later, one note lower, a fainter honk from the shallows below the dam.

I had by now spotted a goose standing on one of the pylons. Honking and pausing. And then a lower beat was missed. I had been mistaken. It was two geese speaking as only geese can speak. And as I stood a little longer, I heard more geese honking from near the low island of limestone boulders near the middle of the river. I couldn’t understand geese language. Perhaps humans are the ones just making noise so often. I hope I am at least partially mistaken. At least look at this bridge and the dam that humans have built. And the cars and jets that carry us from sea to shining sea. Who are we?

The earth was spinning a thousand miles an hour underneath this bridge suspending my feet above thin air and the waters of countless thunderstorms endlessly passing on the way to the Gulf of Mexico. I stepped along at my pace.

Some fishermen had lines in the water just below Bowersock North. One had hooked a fish surely contaminated with human-made chemicals. I paused again and then turned to walk home.

The geese were still calling to each other. Then the goose on the pylon stepped into the air and flapped easily down to the shallows.

Was anything important happening at the Kaw River Bridge this morning? Was I merely making up some sort of meaning out of earth and water and fire – and life. Life does seem to mean something - to more than just me.

I walked on. It was a cold north wind for May. Perhaps the sun would warm things up in a few hours.

And then I saw a large bird circling over the island. Looking closer, I saw the white head and tail feathers of a bald eagle. What was that eagle doing there? Besides the fact that humans stopped using the chemical that had been weakening the shells of eagle eggs, among other damage, saving the bald eagle from extinction,  I would have expected that eagle to be miles to the north by now. It flew with a few strokes of it broad wings across to a fully leafed out tree where eagles usually often perch in the winter on bare branches to fish in the outwash of Bowersock South.

Life is not simple. We share this planet with species that care as only they can care. And here we are.

I bought some strawberries at the farmers market and, after a few more blocks, shared a few with the baristas at the coffee shop and then, still later, with some neighbor girls getting ready for their soccer game in South Park. I probably should have bought another box. The sun was still climbing higher when I got home.

Earth Day

It was Earth Day. As far as I could tell, the universe did not seem to care one way or the other and I was at best an insignificant part of it all. Still, the sky had dawned a brilliant blue – the early chill quickly warming. I walked along Rhode Island Street towards the river to participate in an organized trash cleanup event. I supposed that on such a bright day that anything might be possible – but only in theory. Reality is only what actually is.

Half way to the river, I saw what looked to be an animal – maybe a cat – ahead about a half-a-block on the sidewalk. As I approached, the animal became instead a full grown opossum. I walked carefully nearly close enough to touch the opossum, but it paid no attention to me whatsoever. It was stepping out an extremely slow dance in a very small circle, circling ever inward around itself at the edge of the concrete – one dragging half step and then a long pause and then again a half step and a pause.

Eventually, I bent down on one knee. The opossum’s mouth gaped open near the ground – sharp teeth exposed. It looked like there was blood on its lips. Sounds of pain and struggle came from deep within, but only just audibly enough for me to hear.

The opossum seemed to me to be so completely alone – dying perhaps. Its life – whatever that life had been - was about to be over forever however beautiful the day. The opossum was apparently passing before me in some anguish.

In those few moments the universe became just me and the opossum – the air that we breathed into our lungs and the earth holding our bodies up was all. I said, out loud, ‘I’m sorry.’ I wondered what I could possibly mean by those words and then I repeated them again. I carefully reached out my arm and touched the back of the opossum with my hand. To me, that’s opossum’s fur felt so very unexpectedly soft.

And then I walked on.

This apparent ending was only the beginning of Earth Day, after all.

Bags of trash were picked up. There was a boat and people fishing in the low, yellow sunlight on the river. A white pelican flew high overhead flying south by southeast as I later reached the bridge. Mass Street took my walk due south to a coffee shop where I tried to make the baristas laugh with some silliness of mine. Suddenly, I so easily felt my own life within me.

Then I stepped back out to the sidewalk for the Earth Day parade. A young girl scout handed me a plastic packet of daisy seeds as she walked by.

Everywhere I looked, in sunshine and shade, I saw beautiful people on Earth Day. A fat young woman walking in cut off jean shorts that were riding unevenly up her heavy thighs. A thin man in a grey beard and glasses resting on his nose riding a bicycle with gigantic tires. A mother with her breasts freckling above the V of her dress walked by with her child.

It continued like that all day long. South Park filled with people and awnings. Kids scrunched their eyes shut, getting their faces airbrushed into tigers and zebras. Kids soaked themselves to the skin playing around the Roosevelt Fountain. Grownups talked about solar and recycling. Music played from the gazebo. Yoga in the grass.

And nearing home, a boy riding his first bicycle called out to me from under his bright blue helmet – except for the visor, it was just like the kind his dad wears when he rides his motor cycle. And then two neighbor girls stopped in at my house to see roughly ten thousand tadpoles in my garden pond.

And by evening, with the trees to the west leafing out and sun dappling through, my wife and I ate papaya salad out on the patio.

And finally then, near midnight, I stepped outside once more just to look around. Over the neighbor’s roof, the yellow moon, waning, shone through a hazy sky. And still when I turned, I could see my moon shadow against the dark grass and a budding peony bush.

What more should I say? The sky had not been cloudy all day. But I imagined that the opossum had died on Earth Day.

In the neighborhood

I saw five girls at my garden pond yesterday morning. Well, three, if you didn’t count their moms. And there was one boy, sitting in the grass and clover. Well, two, if I counted again.

The moms reminded me of girls when they were catching tadpoles with their knees on the stones and their hands in the water. And the tadpoles were smaller than watermelon seeds with wriggling tails.

How does it all work? I’ve walked around the block many times and I’ve read books, but when little girls are picking arugula and spinach and lettuce leaves in my garden and big girls are picking up little girls and a little boy like watermelons with wriggling legs and the sun is shining like a dandelion in a bright blue sky and the soil is black from the day before’s wind and rain and the green grass is so soft under bare feet… How does it all happen?

There must have been boys puffing out their throats and singing in a warming spring night. And we all had tails once upon a time and we wriggle what’s left of them without even hardly trying. And when we can’t hardly tell the boys from the girls in the dark or among the stones on the edge of a pond, it is not much more than a jumble of toad’s legs and what was left of those wriggling tails. What has been happening for a long, long, lime time, continues to happen again and again.

One plus one equals two. That much I get. But where does the love come from? What about all the love?

And now back up again one step or two. Yesterday morning I saw ten thousand tadpoles in my garden pond – if anyone had bothered to count. I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls with a ten foot microscope. And on top of the dark clear water reflecting the bright blue sky, there were five girls more or less. And tadpoles in and out of a silvery pie pan. And wriggling tails in cupped hands.

And laughter.

Old man Dylan explained some of it something like this when he was younger: “I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now.”

The times have been changing here and there if you look closely, but they’ve never really been simple. Only a few tadpoles will end up as toads on the lawn. And only some toads will sing and some girls carry watermelons. And the love doesn’t just happen. Especially the love. My hunch is that the love increases in a more complicated way than the wriggling.

But I really haven’t seen how most of that goes. But yesterday morning I saw five girls catching tadpoles and later that day a girl I first saw thirty years ago came home from work and we had salads with spinach and lettuce and arugula. Well, I didn’t have arugula. Some boys and girls just don’t like the taste of that sharp tasting green. And coffee never stunted my growth because I don’t drink it, either

And I didn’t forget to mention the goldfish, but they are not gold. They’re orange. But they do have wriggling tails. I saw little ones swimming that I’m sure I didn’t put into that little pond so there must be some boys and girls. And when I bring out my father’s old microscope, I can see more wriggling in that pond water that my naked eye never before imagined.

So I still know only a little about boys and girls, but what I really cannot explain very well is why my wife loves arugula and me as much as she does.

I sang to her on a warming spring night long ago, but we didn’t have tadpoles until a few years ago. We do have a black and white cat with a slow wriggling fuzzy tail. Her name is Rita. I think you love what you can name, but sometime you only remember the faces. And when the names are more than the peony buds starting to bloom ahead of mother’s day this year and then there’s a bunny sitting in the clover… I have to wonder.

And did I forget to mention that we have had more than one generation of girls in our neighborhood? And we still do. I have seen and heard their names and their faces around my garden pond. And sometime tadpoles wriggle in a silvery pie pan.