Whither

I walk in circles at midnight in my bare feet on fresh laid asphalt.

The katydids are calling from black trees all around me.

The moon is a quarter million miles away, hidden behind drifting clouds.

I know that the moon is an airless sphere of dust and rock.

I know this fact as much as I know anything.

But, there, just over the sharp edge of black leaves in stillness up against a dull gray sky,

I see a fuzzy pale edge of moonlight against ice crystals.

After several paced circles more, an opening of deep space appears in the drifting clouds.

How can this be?

The moon is alive.

And I can feel the sun itself still lingering through the soles of my bare feet on material first laid down millions of years ago.

I walk on.

But now I must ask you to trust me on this next part:

If you come upon a bunny sitting in wet grass and weeds,

you can look deeply into it eye reflecting streetlight

and you will blink first.

But if you approach the same rabbit, however slowly,

you will eventually see the bright cottontail hopping off into the shadows.

Whither the moon?

Whither the eye of the rabbit?

Whither the eyes of my two bare feet after midnight?

And then pages turn.

And then after steps that no one will count,

the ice in my glass on the counter still clinks in the dark

after I step back through my own back door.

And then – one last scene – and you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to –

a cricket crawls on cracked concrete when I flick on the light down in my basement.

The clock hanging crooked on the wall ticks the seconds away.

My arthritic big toe still throbs a little.

But yet you should have seen that cricket jump when I stuck out my own big toe.

Whither the cricket?

Whither the clock?

Whither the darkness and the light?

I’m still thirsty for ice water.

What do you know about that?

 

There is a bend in the river. On the far side, a trail runs through the trees alongside the river – it winds from Burcham Park to the bridge. On the near side, I have clambered down the limestone boulders of the levee several times now and I have built cairns at this bend in the river. That the rocks will come tumbling down – sooner or later - is no matter.

Now I particularly know this particular place along the bend because there is one large limestone boulder that looks las of it has a human-made scar on its face. It’s as if a giant drill bit pierced the limestone layer of rock so that it could be blown up into boulders with dynamite for the levee.   It could all have happened that way. I don’t know.

Nevertheless, this place is unmistakable to me when I stand there near the bend in the river. It’s like this: that one particular stone rests where it rests along that bend in the river, one stone among the many in the levee, waiting or not waiting across the water from where a footbridge along the trail crosses a small creek that empties into the far side of the Kaw River.

I could take you to that bend in the river if you wanted to see it. Or for now, I could show you some pictures instead.

These few photos are from the time that I built a particular cairn at that particular bend in the Kaw River.

Now I feel as if I must remind you that a cairn is just a small tower of rock - balancing. This one cairn had no great significance for me – except that I chose and I balanced the stones. The stones wouldn’t have done that all by themselves. Not just that particular way that I did it. And so I simply enjoy building small cairns along the river now and then. Not for forever. I just build a cairn now and then. Signifying a place. Signifying myself, perhaps. 

For now. Not for forever.

But a limestone boulder is a real thing. Like a cairn. Like a river. Like me.

Some scattering is to be expected over time.

And then that morning a heron happened along. That particular heron was as real as it could get on that particular morning several weeks ago. You can hardly see it in the photos I took – I had just turned back to look one more  time and I saw a great blue heron flying near the bend in the river, flying out over the water where the river bends, flying just past where I had built my cairn. I clicked my camera, hoping to capture something.

And what do you know about that?

I was there. I saw what I saw. I even have the photographs. And I still find it hard to believe that the sky could be so blue, that the water could have been so still, that the reflections of the trees on the far bank could appear so clearly on the surface of the river, that a heron could fly by just as I was looking back at the cairn I had built.

So I build cairns because I can.

What do you know about that?

Flip flop heart – a little word play

She left them lying where they lay.

They were just too far apart.

She had left him lying one last time

and then she tore herself away.

Her eyes tearing up,

leaving her failed dreams behind her,

she dashed up the street

towards midnight.

Then after nearly half a block –

it felt to her like forever –

her heart –

gone beyond breaking -

she irrevocably stumbled,

the edge of her flip flop catching

on a crack in the sidewalk –

that’s when the strap between her toes finally tore loose.

And something else.

She fled from her lost and forsaken love,

plying on in her own bare feet.

Perhaps she would buy another pair of 

flip flops at an end of the summer sale.

And perhaps new love would spring in the fall.

But all she now truly wanted

was a pair of genuine leather 

winter boots

against the coming cold.

**

Don’t let the sun and the moon get in your eyes.

photo by Mike Higley

Years ago, I don’t remember for sure which time it was, but my family was visiting relatives in the panhandle of Texas. Walter Cronkite was on the TV telling us that men were walking on the moon. Of course, we went outside to see it. The moon shone high overhead. The sky was clear.

Earlier today, some friends of mine drove up near Dawson, Nebraska. That would have been August 21, 2017. Highway 75 was full of cars heading north. Rain was occasionally  spitting on our windshield. We joined a bunch of people we had never met around Verdun Lake near the Big Nemaha River. The sky was mostly overcast. But there was a brief clearing a little after 11:30 and we all looked up through our eclipse glasses to indeed see the moon take a nibble out of the sun.

At totality, no one waiting around Verdun Lake saw through the clouds to where the sun was completely hiding its face from us from behind the moon. All around us we saw a strange darkness come over us for just a couple of minutes. The chatter of humans nearly ceased. A flock of geese took off from the lake heading towards the east. And shortly afterwards, we packed our folding chairs and the remains of lunch and we soon joined long lines of cars heading south. Just imagine - the traffic was stop and go.

And then the sky cleared. We pulled over and looked up through our very, very dark glasses. A crescent of the sun was returning.

Here’s what I think. Keep your eclipse glasses. Or just step outside and look with your eyes open or closed sometime. In Lawrence you can see the sun rise at precisely 6:40 tomorrow morning. Rain or shine, the sun will be there. And look for a new moon. If you know where to look, you will see footprints.

Sometimes, not seeing is believing.

Belinda

My wife and I were sailing along the freeway. The Garmin was telling us in measured tones to turn right in one mile. Our Prius was making everything as easy and comfortable as possible for us. The climate inside was controlled. The air inside the pressed steel and safety glass cabin of our silvery space/time travelling device registered a cool 74 on the instrument panel. The changing climate outside of our windows was hardly very much of our concern at the moment. We were two moderns in our own technological time on a road trip to Kansas City.

Bluetooth carried the recorded voices of Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young from an iPodTouch to our ears. And then, when I managed to ignore that parroting Garmin, I managed to catch some fragments of the music and the words coming out of the speakers.

“When you see the Southern Cross for the first time

You understand now why you came this way

‘Cause the truth you might be runnin’ from is so small

But it’s as big as the promise, the promise of a coming day”

A person could listen to a song for a hundred times and still not really hear it.

I’m not entirely sure just what I was hearing inside my Prius. I mean, we mostly live in a metaphorical world as it is. I have sometimes wondered how much of the world out there beyond the confines of my mind – even within the structures of mind - is real. Perhaps the four windows around my body, as I am strapped securely into my bucket seat, are just more screens like in the movies where you see the actors saying their lines with the images of trees and soybean fields just blurring by in low resolution. But if I think at all, metaphors are pretty much how I think.

They say that we were already living by our metaphors when the first human beings crossed out of Africa. And now, we are indeed still not machines, after all. Our thoughts are not just lines of code in a program. We are flesh, blood and neurotransmitters. But who counts on their fingers anymore? When’s the last time you rang someone up? What is it that you are dropping when a call gets dropped? Does anyone hear it on the grapevine anymore? It might be time to batten down the hatches. The world is awash in metaphors. Not all of them are fully tethered to the modern world. What do we mean by our lives today, not to mention our words?

Consider Alexander von Humboldt. When he crossed the equator in 1799 during something like a three month journey on a wooden sailing ship across the ocean, he was a human in his late twenties. Somewhere near South America the man wrote these words in his journal: “On the night of the 4^th of July I saw the Southern Cross for the first time it all its splendor.”  And then in his wandering, he and his traveling companions tramped through the rain forest in all of its wildness. They climbed the Andes without Vibram soles – what shoes they had had shredded. On these jaunts in that day, they travelled on foot or in small boats. They did have some guides, but von Humboldt mostly just made his maps as he went.

And as before and since, there was metaphor mingling in everything he recorded of his journeys. So you might possibly try to imagine what von Humboldt really meant when he said that he saw the Southern Cross for the first time. This is what he actually wrote: “I saw the Southern Cross for the first time.” I don’t happen to believe that he was just talking about the stars. But he was talking about stars.

And so what about Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young?

None of us are talking in zeros and ones when we describe our travels or write a song. We blend letters into words and words into images and images into meaning.  Metaphors. Music. And at some point I, too, will cross an equator. I have traveled in a hybrid ship along a concrete highway at speeds that would have been unimaginable to Alexander von Humboldt. And he might still have understood something of my words now as I now echo the words of many others. In reality, I never actually saw that equator – that imaginary line dividing North from South. Neither did von Humboldt. Whose idea was ‘north’ in the first place?’ It did happen to be von Humboldt’s idea to describe human-caused climate change. Alexander von Humboldt imagined new metaphors for his natural world. But the universe is still much bigger than his or my life.

So back to here and now. Of course, I never saw those stars in that sky. The ones that von Humboldt saw. The Southern Cross. Remember, if you will, a metaphor is made up out of a tangling of the real and the imagined.

So here’s now my question: do you believe in an expansive mind?

“Got out of town on a boat

goin’ to the southern islands …

I have been around the world …”

Perhaps I should go ahead and tell you a little bit more of reality as Dawn and I lived it on our road trip.

After less than an hour, we docked our Prius. There were red bricks everywhere. On the streets. The sidewalks. Even the buildings rising over our heads were made out of brick. We stood at the Crossroads. My traveling companion suggested that we head east. I could see train tracks. Union Station. But we weren’t heading that way, so I went ahead and followed Dawn.

At one point we stopped at a gallery. There were large paintings behind large windows. It turned out that the woman inside also did upholstery. She had a friendly curly-beige-furred little dog. I twizzled it’s ears. It jumped up against my leg for more. But this is hardly very important information.

After few more minutes, we followed her directions through the brick streets and buildings toward Central and turned north.

Lulu’s Thai Noodle Shop was on the corner. It was packed with the lunchtime crowd. I had never been to Lulu’s before, but Lulu’s had hardly actually risen to metaphorical levels. I was expecting to eat, not to see the Southern Cross.

We waited on a bench. There were talking strangers all around. Lipstick here. A buttoned-down collar there. A tall bald man carried plates with noodles through the aisle. He never looked from side to side.

Then a woman in black called our names. We followed her to a table in the corner and she left menus. The lunch menu was simple, less than ten different noodle dishes - each one - $8.99.

I had already nearly decided on a dish that I had never eaten before: Beef Jantaboon. When our server came up to our table, my traveling companion asked what was really popular among their offerings at Lulu’s. The server seemed really friendly to me, but maybe she was just really good at her job. She looked young. But then I am old. I had thought at a glance that she was pretty with her thick curly dark hair tied back, but then I had hardly looked beyond her eyes. They weren’t glittery like stars. I think that they sparkled more like the sun reflecting off ripples on a wide ocean – or a river. But I’m afraid that I’m slipping into the doldrums of detail here.

The young woman was suggesting three items from the menu before us – including the Jantaboon. It was easy for me to follow her advice. Dawn, my wife and travelling companion, sitting across the table from me - we shared forkfuls from each other’s bowls of noodle. The noodles were good. We each got a small crab Rangoon, but certainly that bit wasn’t important, either.

I occasionally looked out from our table and watched how the hem of the cotton print of the server’s skirt fluttered as our server danced between the tables. Dawn had a Thai Chai Tea. It looked like muddy river water over ice in a glass, to me.

As we were finally getting up to leave, the server came towards us one more time carrying a silver pitcher, beaded with condensation. “I was going to offer you more water, but it looks like I’m too late,” she said.

And that’s when I saw the Southern Cross for the first time, metaphorically speaking.

“I have been around the world

Lookin’ for that woman girl

Who knows that love can endure

And you know it will.”

Sometime things just ring out in your ears. Maybe this doesn’t make sense to you. It’s metaphorical. Of course much of all of this was almost all in my imagination and not likely to be entirely what you will think in any case from your reading. But that reality is no more. Only I am left to tell my tale. But listen to me: sometime a look in someone’s eyes is all that it takes. And maybe you’ve missed it a hundred times. And maybe sometimes you see it.

She was just a friendly server in reality.

Metaphors are what happen when you take one real thing and you make up something else.

The only real question is whether you believe that love can endure. We are going to have to mind our metaphors for that to really happen. The climate will be a-changin’ .

But as I said, my wife and I are thoroughly modern. We paid the check with virtual plastic money. Our server had left the bill on the table with a smile – not an emoticon. I am telling you that her smile was real. Her voice was real - and friendly. She had seen us playing with our devices on the table, taking tourist shots, before we got our food. She had suggested that the Lulu’s sign just outside made a nice backdrop for a selfie. She would turn out to be right about that too.

And if I hadn’t glanced down at the check, I never would have learned that her name was Belinda. And now I know. She’s heading into a world I will never see.

But not every detail matters. Nor does it matter that Alexander von Humboldt’s ship was called the Pizarro. Or that my wife and I, as you might know, were just sailing in our Prius across the state line for lunch and a little sight-seeing.

“I have my ships and my flags are all a-flying

She is all I have left and music is her name.”

Alexander von Humboldt, CSN&Y and I will just be sharing a few words as we write. The metaphors mean for each of us what they mean.

But there is this:

when you see the Southern Cross for the first time

you understand now why you came this way…

I heartily suggest that you just go ahead and listen to the CSN&Y YouTube for yourself if you wish. I don't know what else I can say.

Link to Crosby, Stills and Nash: Southern Cross - YouTube

Like a diamond in the sky

I increasingly feel at home in the universe. I accept the stories that modern astronomy tells us about the stars – so very much matter and energy – and the distances and time as well - our universe. And yet what I can see with my own eyes is familiar. Again and again I look up and I see the stars. For countless generations, human beings have created a kind of meaning and understanding out of what appears to be an otherwise random sky.

And so I stepped outside and looked up at the night sky earlier this summer - and I saw Cygnus the Swan. Even with our light polluted skies and with my rudimentary astronomical knowledge, I could readily make out five stars that are part of the constellation Cygnus from my own backyard.

You could visualize part of the constellation Cygnus as a diamond kite that is tipped onto its side. The paper and the sticks are unseen, of course, but you can see the points of the kite as points of light - one star in the middle where the two sticks would cross and four more at the ends of the sticks. As I looked east over the roof of my house, the star at the point where you would tie the kite tail was southernmost, nearly over my chimney.

There is a very evident order to our universe. We know that the stars form galaxies and super clusters that are expanding away from each other at unfathomable speeds. And yet from our human perspective, the stars over our heads are always precisely where they should be as the earth turns under our feet. The pole star hangs due north in the sky and at an angle of 39 degrees above the horizon from where I usually stand on the earth. Each year as summer begins, Cygnus will always be rising in the east near midnight, wheeling around the pole star. And so on the thirtieth of May, 2017, I saw Cygnus the Swan flying just over my roof. I think that it is something to always be able to rely on the stars being out there. I have to be looking to see them.

Now it is easier for me to visualize geese than swans. I have often actually seen geese flying close at hand. From the surface of the Kaw River they flap their wings hard, scrambling to lift their bodies clear of the surface of water. They beat their large wings again and again as they climb into the sky gaining elevation. And then they are overhead, their wings outstretched, body and neck and head extending forward. The geese fly forward. And one night, I, just one single human being, standing in my backyard around midnight at the beginning of another summer, I saw a clear, fleeting image of one of those geese, playing out in a pattern of stars against a not quite black sky.

I don’t generally see the images associated with the constellations. Mostly the stars just form some patterns that I have come to recognize. The patterns have been named by people from the beginning of time. The big and little dipper look like dippers. Ursa Major and Ursa Minor – the big and little bear - in the eyes of some ancients. Cassiopeia is an elongated W. The throne of a queen. In a few more months, I will spot Orion the Hunter rising in the winter in the southern part of the sky. I look for the three stars of Orion’s belt. I forget which star in the whole figure of Orion is Rigel and which is Betelgeuse. I could look it up. Or I could just look up. I have my own names for some of the patterns I recognize.

But on this night I saw a giant goose flying forward across the night sky. Just over my roof. Flying in such nearly infinite slow-motion, with such power and grace that all of time might have just as well have stopped. It was a giant goose up there just over my roof – flying forward. And then it was just stars in the night sky again.

For imagination to work you have to have looked carefully over some time. At the geese flying from the river, for example. At the stars in the night time. You put all of these patterns into your memory over time and then one night they might just overlap somewhere in your mind. And you will be amazed, as I have been, at what you see.

I suggest that you not make either too much or too little of the imagining and realities that I am talking about here. And you surely don’t have to take my words for any of this if you don’t want to. But I am here to tell you that you can see all sorts of amazing things for yourself. And something of what I saw.

Just step outside on a clear summer night.

Look up.

Cygnus flies true.

Moonflower coupes

I dreamt that I saw two of those long forgotten half-moon coupes

flowing passed me as I stood in my garden

in the silent deep of the night.

Those crescent bodies of the deuce coupes were fashioned

entirely out of dreams and white-petaled moonflowers,  

soft as a little girl’s skin.

As I watched, those two coupes

glided onward down the ash-colored street,

shimmering, wakes of incandescence cooling

and then faintly splashing against the low curbing

to either side of the street.

There was no other sound.

I heard not a whisper of wind

in the silent deep of the moonlit night.

And then the satiny hushed coupes both turned together

onto the yard in front of the dark-windowed house

where the two little tow-haired neighbor girls I know both live.

And I will tell you now,

the ground-hugging edges of those moonflower coupes

fluttered just a little like little girls’ ruffled skirts

as they floated effortlessly

up and over the curbed edge and onto the dewy grass

in the silent deep of a moonflowered night.

The two little girls must have been fast asleep at that hour,

of course, and you should know, if you don’t already know,

that moonflowers bloom for only one night.