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Enchantment
Thursday, December 31, 2009 V.1.1. Welcome to my first post of the new year. It's a bit longer than usual, but I trust the new year will be standard length and no more. I start the year with photos from a little hiking thing I did over the holidays, and, along with other great poets, five poems from our friend Teresa White, our feature poet for this first of the new year post, as well as some haiku from Alice Folkart, another friend. Heres the rest of the line up: enchantment Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishan The Moon and Kaguya The Day After Dying Me between Lexington Street and the brewery Carl Phillips The Hustler Speaks of Places Youth and Satyr, Both Resting Teresa White Green Wedding Aaron Silverberg Life as a Body Me a bunch of suits come in Rita Dove Night Teresa White A Vacation in the Alps Sunil Freemen What the Man in the Frayed Sweater Might Be Thinking (Metrobus, February) She's Got an Unbroken String of Broken Hearts Me all about the fun Rod McKuen Turning Point Teresa White Waitress Bing My Dream Occupation Larissa Szporluk Death by a Thousand Cuts The Corals Me my fifteen minutes today John Philip Santos New Sun Texas At the Hill of Old Boots Teresa White Ferris Wheel Me watching the ice imps play The Monk Noin After the storm... As I approach... Fujiwara No Sadaie You do not come, and I wait... Lady Otomo No Sakanor You say, "I will come..." Basho Two haiku Kikakku One haiku Issa One haiku Ryota One haiku Alice Folkart Three Teresa White The Iris Karl Heinzelman Ode to a Toaster Me spiders dancing Gary Snyder Glacier Ghosts Me another Sunday going down Once again, before I begin, I want to remind all that I would really like to have contribution from "Here and Now" readers - poems, micro-fiction, paintings, photos and such.I have the next issue pretty much in the bag and at this point don't have any reader contribution. "Here and Now may not win any grand prizes, but it has a lot of readers. Send me your stuff so that I can share it with others. That said, I start this week with one of my own.  This first poem tells the story of my climb to the top of Enchantment Rock, something I hadn't done in 20 years. I was thinking, that, as I'm getting older, this might be the last chance I have to do the climb, something I first did when about 7 years old. It is a pretty steep uphill hike, 425 feet up from where you start to the top on a trail about half a mile long. Not serioius mountain rock climbing, (I've done a little of that and know the difference), but still a pretty good climb for an old guy. It was cold as hell on top with a very strong wind, and once we got there, there was nothing to do but turn around and go back down, difficult in it own way. But it was fun to do and especially fun to do it with my son. enchantment to break away so hard have i grown the writer's shell around me it is hard to break free, to leave my writing table long enough to do something to write about finally, tomorrow is the day to put my pen away and go, tomorrow, to see if i can still climb Enchanted Rock - that huge pink-granite boulder rising, across 640 acres in Texas hill country, to a height of more than 1,900 feet above sea level the first time i climbed it i was about 7, an intrepid scaler of flat- country canal banks, and it was a fearsome mountain to be conquered not so fearsome now, in fact, but still a very high, very, very steep rock to climb for this senior, untroubled for years by inclinations toward exercise - but i figure though twenty years younger the last time i went to the top, i was also, at the time, into my third decade of heavy smoking surely now, i'm thinking/hoping, i can do it again, seeing as how, though twenty years older, ten of those years were as a nonsmoker, which means i have both lungs now, mostly un obstructed just in case, though, my son, a dedicated rough-country hiker and camper, is going with me and, skilled in all the necessary survival techniques of the rough and ready, will have his cell phone preset for one button dialing to 911 got rocks the first half of the hike, though steep, is not hard, broken rocks, shoe box size and larger, like steps, lead the way up from midpoint it gets harder, but not too hard for the group of scouts following their leader up the sharp incline of bare pinkish rock, quick-marching as they pass us across the top, rounded and bare like someone's bald head, slight depressions, filled with rainwater and high-drifting dust and plant spores, scatter several mini-marshes with reeds and grass and, even in one, a tree, winter-striped and bold against the sky - smaller holes in the rock, cooking-pot size and almost perfectly round, caught and held scarce rain for those who lived in the rolling tide of dry rocky hills, cactus, cedar, and goats that spread from the base of this knob of pink rock in all directions to the horizon life savers in dry seasons, carved in this high outpost by those who came before even those who came before the Comanche, the rock a cistern where even the fog and dew of high clouds can be collected and saved a sacred place to the first peoples, with a long history for both whites and those who rode these hills before - an indian princess left to die in a cave at the top (stand by the entrance of the cave and hear her crying still) a place of hiding for those German ranchers and shepherds who would not fight for slavery and against the union - some of their bones lie here, too, among the litter and crevices of great granite blocks tumbled like scattered toys around the rock's base for years, an oddity in the corner of a rancher's land, known mostly by those who lived around and by word of mouth to a few beyond - a state park now, a day's recreation for hikers and for those who just want to look at, climb up, the largest rock they'll likely ever see this big rock hanging bare against the horizon  Next in this first of the year post are several poems by Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan from her book Shadow Mountain, published in 2008 by Four Ways Books. The poet was born in Santa Monica and raised in Los Angeles. She received her B.A. in English from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, earned an M.F.A. in poetry from the University of Virginia and an M.A. in literature at the University of California at Berkeley, then earned a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing at the University of Houston. She is a full time instructor at Houston Community College, Central Campus, and lives in Houston with her husband, an HIV/AIDS researcher at Baylor College of Medicine. The Moon and Kaguya It's September 15, 1989. I'm twenty years old. My name is Kaguya. I speak to a flamingo wall. Autumn lilies smile in their sleep. The sky listens. A wise wind blows my voice into the dying apricots. My hair is dark as sumi ink. I let it grow and trail down the back of my kimono. Now I change into a mother dove. I gather three-hundred twigs to cup my eggs. There's a blue jay on the wire. I think I'll go and become a butterfly. I weave myself a sugar cocoon and sleep all year. A child has licked my wings. I can't fly. I'll hide in a granite pagoda. The Velveeta moon rises. A mother opossum is dead. She lies on the cornstalk hill curled like a croissant. Blackbirds have ripped her belly apart. Her cubs wait on the powder trail. Flies and ants carry her body in pieces. They leave behind her chocolate fur. I pause where crows form doves on the plum horizon. The oily sea is full of seaweed lizards. The sky is empty. I'm grey as a square in Escher's drawing. Yesterday, you dressed like a yellowtail tuna. (Kaguya, there isn't such a thing.) Be quiet moon, I just created it. (You're only a woman, Kaguya.) I'm a woman god. Go away moon - get out of my poem. (Who will be the moon if I leave?) I'll make myself the moon. I rise a new mother. My children are the platinum stars. I feed them corn pebbles. They ask me my name. I tell them, I am the pickled moon of November. Do not be afraid. The terrible moon has gone away. The sun is shining over Europe. Tonight, I must rise in the East. I help the wind grind shriveled sardines into the soil. We pull back our hair like dried mushroom stems, take scissors, cut it off, until there's nothing left but a stump of azaleas. The Day After I saw him staring at me under the neighbor's parked car, caught the blue tag dangling from his collar, light and shadow flickering, his tongue grooming his paw, his tail swishing its black and beige rings, as he licked each individual claw clean, I saw him staring at me, his eyes narrowing, oblivious to the spider near him, his amber-eyed persistence following me over the speed bump, concrete courtyard littered with acorns and withering crepe myrtle, The look in his eyes said, Carpe Diem. Tabula Rasa. I don't love you, I don't love you at all...I don't love you - I want to erase, silence the words, the long vowels mouthed that night. To think of tabula rasa, starting from scratch - What an alluring thought to start life all over again: nine lives and no loyalties. Dying I'll die decades from now, in the century Two Thousand. Will people say, You look terrible? What will I look like? A white pumpkin? A ginger pickle? Where will I be - in the light of a spider chandelier? Will I recognize the usual voices? What will contain me? The air, clouds, possibly the moon? Will my bones turn blue underground, or will there be men and women picking hem out of ashes? I think about it all the time.  Dee and I had a nice afternoon on the Riverwalk before Christmas, more, perhaps, of a walk than I had planned, but pleasant still. This was on the new portion of the Riverwalk, between the Lexington Street Bridge and the old Pearl Brewery, and past that nearly now, to the zoo. between Lexington Street and the brewery the river at dusk flows creamy black, a sensuously swirling hot tar stream between Christmas-lit banks on either side darkly beautiful i think, as i walk from the Lexington Street Bridge to the brewery, going to my car to pick up the keys to the car we left on the bridge a well-thought-out plan to walk the new section of the Riverwalk, leaving cars at both ends so we wouldn't have to walk then walk back like all well-thought-out plans, subject to the thin dread hands of fate, this time in the form of she who will not be named leaving the keys to her car parked on one end of the walk in my car parked where we started on the other - we need to come back at night to see all the lights she said an hour and a half ago as we began our late afternoon walk, i bet it's really beautiful then well, yes, it is, i can testify, having now been there, done that and, by the way, here's your keys  Carl Phillips, born in 1959, is Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program. He was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and his work has been frequently honored and anthologized. Those honors include the 2006 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. My next two poems are from his second book, Cortege, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award published by Graywolf Press in 1995. The Hustler Speaks of Places after Langston Hughes I've known places; I've known places weary as the flesh when it's had some, as rivers at last done with flowing. My soul has been changed in places. I mouthed a man dry in the Ritz-Carlton men's room. I built a life upon a man's chest and, briefly, found peace. I watched a man sleeping; I raised a prayer over his brow. I heard the stinging, in bars, of lashes coming down on a man's bare ass, until it tore to the red that is sunset. I've known places: shaven, uncut places. My soul has changed in places. Youth and Satyr, Both Resting there are certain words - ecstasy, abandon, surrender - we can wait all our lives, sometimes, not so much to use, as to use correctly; then the moment at last comes, the right scene but more impossibly different than any we'd earlier imagined, and we stumble, catching instead at nouns like desire, that could as easily be verbs, unstable adjectives like rapt or unseemly. We find that for once nothing at hand serves quite as well as the finger doing what it does, pointing: at the wine whose slim remains the two glasses - tipped slightly, given over to the grass as to their own sweet brand of longing - look like any moment letting go of; or the boy's hand, fallen in such a way as to just miss touching the predictably stiff phallus - no other word here will do - of the satyr; or at how the O of the boy's mouth, barely open, is the same O that the satyr's beard, abruptly arching away from his shag-covered chest, and on, skyward, seems most like wanting to curl into, if only it could...which in turn is the same O repeated by those the grapes' twisting vines - too artificially, perhaps - string above and, to either side of the two sleepers, in the manner of any number of unresolvable themes, let dangle.  I'm very happy to be featuring five poems by our friend Teresa White in this first post of 2010. Teresa, twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has made her work available to "Here and Now" readers a number of time and it's great to have her back again this week. Previously published in numerous online and print journals, her latest full-length collection of poems, Gardenias for a Beast, received a favorable endorsement from Billy Collins, among others. This next is the first of the five featured this week. Green Wedding White, they insist, but this is the last minute before I turn twenty-five. My eager heart races with the chance to actually call someone by name and, later, learn this is mine. Green is good and solid. What foundation doesn't fall, ultimately, and slip into the long soft slope of a hill? Yes. I mean that green, the dress, the single one not stored away in some neighbor's garage. You wear hound's tooth. Eschew black - the surest color of misfortune and we shall have none of that. We will walk down the rounding stair through an open field of sunburnt flowers, wait for the crown, twisted by a child, briefly, before you place it on my head. I have a poem now by Aaron Silverberg from his book, Thoreau's Chair, published in 2001 by Off The Map Enterprises of Seattle. Silverberg graduated from the University of California at San Cruz in 1978 with a degree in philosophy. He is a personal life and liberation coach, as well as providing private lessons in tennis and writing. Life as a Body Lay the body down. Pick the body up. Touch another body. Wash/feed/cloth the body. Listen to the body's pain. Decide what to do with the body. Rest the body. Acknowledge that you even have a body. Look at skeletons in a museum and shiver. Forgive the mind. Walk the body. Laugh the body. Dance in a larger body. Soak the body. Float the body. Soothe the body. Search out the body electric. Bring home the body. Give up the body. Admire other bodies. Want particular bodies. Push the body past its limits. Ignore the body. Heal broken parts of the body. Feel alone in the body. Fearfully refuse to ask on the body's behalf. Allow others enjoyment of this body. Fail to find compassion for older bodies. Watch the body change. Long for a different body. Judge the body. Laugh at other bodies. Make do with this body. Leave the body.  Here's some more of my coffee house observations. a bunch of suits come in a bunch of suits come in for a meeting and i'm thinking, wow that used to be me and did i really look that don't-want'a-be-here funny, that's not the way i remember it, a time of imposing my will on turbulent winds, the same winds i now try to glide above, escaping notice as much as i can... meanwhile on the other side of the room a young woman is telling a story and her face is the face of a great actress telling telling telling with her eyes and every plane of her face telling telling telling everything and as i watch i am drawn into the story and what a great story it is - leaving me breath less  Rita Dove, one of my favorites, was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1993. At 41 years, she was the youngest person to receive this highest official honor in American letters, and the first African-American as well. She held the position for two years. In 1999 she was reappointed Special Consultant in Poetry for 1999/2000, the Library of Congress's bicentennial year, and in 2004 Virginia governor Mark Warner appointed her as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, a two year position. She attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio as a National Achievement Scholar, graduating summa cum laude with a degree in English in 1973, followed by two semesters as a Fulbright scholar at University of Tubingen in Germany. Dove taught creative writing at Arizona State University from 1981 to 1989 and subsequently joined the faculty of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she holds the chair as Commonwealth Professor of English. In her spare time she enjoys playing the viola da gamba, a 17th century string instrument related to the cello, her classical voice training and - together with her husband - ballroom dancing and Argentinean tango. Night Joe ain't studying nobody. He laughs his own sweet bourbon banner, he makes it to work on time. Late night, Joe retreats through the straw-link-and-bauble curtain and up to bed. Joe sleeps. Snores gently as a child after a day of marbles. Joe knows somewhere he had a father who would have told him how to act, Mama, stout as a yellow turnip, loved to bewail her wild good luck: Blackfoot injun, tall with hair like a whip. Now to do it without him is the problem. To walk into a day and quietly absorb. Joe takes after Mama. Joe's Mr. Magoo. Joe thinks, half dreaming, if he ever finds a place where he can think, he'd stop clowning and drinking and then that wife of his would quit sending prayers through the chimney Ah, Lucille. Those eyes, bright and bitter as cherry bark, those coltish shins, those thunderous hips! No wonder he couldn't leave her be, no wonder whenever she began to show he packed a fifth and split. Joe in funk and sorrow. Joe in parkbench celibacy, in apostolic factory rote, in guild (the brief astonishment of memory), in grief when guild turns monotonous. He always knows when to go on home.  Now here's our second helping of Teresa White this week. A Vacation in the Alps The day room had curtains plush as the Fox theater covering barred windows, small round tables bolted to the floor, and Kee-rist! the checkers and jigsaw puzzles. Poor Tiny had the sunshiny Alps in so many blue and white goddamn pieces, I wondered if he'd ever get out. He fell into his dream so hard they began feeding him orange M&M's. Some old-timers planned to spend the winters there. They said they knew how to get in. One old man told how he'd go to McDonald's about noon and begin ripping bouquets from the ceiling until the cops came. He said he was always out by spring.  My next poems are by Sunil Freeman, from his book That Would Explain the Violinist published in 1993 by Gut Punch Press. Freeman's parents met a a refugee camp in Kurukshetra, India in 1947. His father was a Quaker volunteer from North Carolina and his mother, from Uttar Pradesh, was also a volunteer working in the camp's preschool program during the day and teaching HIndi to adults in the evening. Freeman, himself, lived most of his life in the Washington, D.C. area, except for a few years in India, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. He has a degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and is assistant director of the Writer's Center, and has been a managing editor of Poet Lore, the nation's oldest continuously publishing poetry journal. He published a second book Surreal Freedom Blues, in 1999. His work is featured frequently in poetry and literary journals. What the Man in the Frayed Sweater Might Be Thinking (Metrobus, February) His eyes shift like he's tracking reflections so I look at the motion picture mirrored in the glass. Translucent buses and cars run down ghost pedestrians who keep on walking; a cartoon world. He stares out the window as an armada of cumulus clouds races across the sky. Riffles of cirrus might be ripples on a wind-tossed lake. Lamp posts, grayish-white, suggest sycamores. The window reflects rectangular chunks of sky like some old avant-garde photograph. The man's in his late thirties. Watching him is like seeing pictures of European Jews before Kristallnacht. He's alive for now; the way he turns his head, I'm pretty sure he's noticed the whine by the left back wheel sounds like a Middle Eastern translation of the blues. Miles Davis could have polished it into something unforgettable. When his eyes close I think of waiting for buses - how the cold hammers a man to a place where warmth, when it arrives barreling down the road, triggers a drone which begins in bone marrow and spreads till his temples are those of a child, and when that buzz synchronizes with the hum of the bus he closes his eyes, alive and not hurting, and that's enough. She's Got an Unbroken String of Broken Hearts If she traveled in different circles she'd inspire a dozen Country and Western classics before reaching thirty. We lean toward the last embers before they go down like the sun. She speaks of the others that didn't work out. I sympathize with those men, and all who will follow. Her voice is a drug. The chill, far away, touches my skin. Later, I hear a line from the refrain, pain shot like a syringe of uncut emotion straight to the singer's heart. A steel guitar cries, a cripple wolf abandoned by the pack.  I wrote this one before Christmas also, at a time when I was all caught up in the fun I was happening at the moment. all about the fun the coolest thing is i walked in here about ten minutes ago knowing i was going to write a poem with no idea of what kind of poem it would be or what it would be about and now that i've written ten lines (eleven counting this one) i still don't know and it's exciting - maybe even good for an adrenaline rush if poets were allowed such things wahoo!! i'd be saying right now if i was doing ski jumps or racing in the Indy 500 or heading for first place in a pumpkin-pie-eating contest instead, i'm more, like, stuck with well, ahem, what rhymes with Indianapolis and the best thing is i don't even have to finish the poem for that secret rush there was, after all, as much agony as ecstasy in that old tv sports show, the ski jumper crashing in a crumbling sliding rolling heap as often as gracefully touching down to great applause and all but one of the racers at the Indy loses, many crashing their race car along the way to their loss, and the pie- eating contest, well, best to say, just don't get between the contestants and the bathroom as they all rush off to pay the consequences of both winning and losing so i don't feel bad at all about getting to this final leap over the chasm of a poem that never ended up being about anything at all no worries, i say, it's just all about the fun after all  One of the best pairing of artists I can remember was Rod McKuen sung by Gordon Lightfoot, in, I think, the late sixties. I don't have Lightfoot this week, but I do have McKuen. Turning Point The road turns here, up ahead you see it dissolving in the dust. I would have you now dissolving into me suspended, held aloof by my arms only. Hanging on but letting go. ~~~~ the sky is cloudless here look above and you can see it blue on blue, bareheaded and not breathing. I would wish for you the same clear cloudless eye seeking mine straightforwardly and true not breathing and bareheaded as I breathe my way through you. ~~~~ The sun is friendly here look just left and you can see it warm but kindly so and clearly caring. I would ask of you that you be ever warm willing to be kind not letting me forget that kindness is the passport and the proven way for two to journey though a lifetime, each other, or a single summer day.  Here's number 3 of our feature of our friend, Teresa White. Waitress Being My Dream Occupation She wears gold crosses in her ears, a white uniform with her name an embroidered fleur-de-lis on her chest. I want to be her when I grow up. Fries come with almost everything and coffee cools quick in the cup. Of course I'll wear my long hair up, the front ratted into a high curve - I'll stick my pencil in it. I will learn to wear make-up. At least lipstick. The redder the better. I might even get some of that blusher, the kind in the little pot. What better way to meet the man of my dreams? Who among them will be able to resist my narrow waist, perfect nail polish, looming smile? My fingertips will run races over the Braille of their nickels and dimes. I'll tap my foot, my foot will repeat: in time, in due time.  Now I have two pieces by Larissa Szporluk from her book Dark Sky Question, published by Beacon Press in 1998. Szporluk was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and graduated from the University of Michigan. She studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop and graduated from University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Virginia with an MFA. She teaches at Bowling Green State University and was a visiting professor at Cornell University, in 2005. Death by a Thousand Cuts The human body is transparent, the heart an underwater flower that can't be reached through the waves. You can look through your fingers at the sun. Like the little fish Echenceis who curbs the violence of the wind, your hand can turn your hatred into smoke. Keep waving at your husband. Feel the sizzling. The smoke becomes radiant, not a trick. You can feel yourself dispelled in it, easily, invisibly, the way God pierces nature to make things grow. compare the sulfur river under ground, hurling themselves in the stony dark, with the paradise of outer space, a flow without a vein. The Corals Below man, below hearing, below the ghostly movement, they are growing. Below the splendor and tether of a spawning domain, they grow. Without sky, without goal, without children to feel of their own, they grow rosy and odd, like a cloud in the head, drawing the water's spectra, turning everything dead into edifice, the plain floor mountainous, founding a home for the end of the animal form, a skeletal welcome, shrine to the endocrine: these are the tombs of the sea, growing huge in the prodigal deep, where a life comes around to empty its backbone.   Sometimes, despite even my best efforts, hassle intrudes and the dude does not abide in me. my fifteen minutes today most days i wake up and do what i want to do until i don't want to do it anymore but this is a schedule and benchmark day so i have to get humping right away, cut my two hour breakfast, newspaper reading, and poem writing, down to a forty-five minutes - bacon and eggs, newspaper speed reading and no poem writing except for this that i'm sneaking in during bathroom break and i only have fifteen minutes so don't expect no damn masterpiece cause this is pressure writing and there goes five minutes already - the big thing today is buying a new air conditioner and furnace, though my furnace is only eight years old no one will install a new a/c without also installing a new furnace, some kind of capitalism thing having to do with suckers and cleaners and i never did understand economics but i know i need a new air conditioner, the old one was bought in 1984 and it's only a 3-ton unit and we added a room when we converted the garage to a den and it hasn't kept up since so i'm thinking we need at least a 3 and a half maybe 4 tonner, and with a 15 efficiency rating we'll save the cost of the unit over 15 years which is probably longer than i'm going to live but it's another one of those capitalism things about getting return on my investment even though i'm going to be ash floating in the sky by the time this investment returns and that's just the beginning of what i've got to do today but it's the end of this poem cause my fifteen minutes are up  John Philip Santos is a freelance filmmaker, producer, journalist, and writer. A former executive producer and and director for Thirteen/WNET, he has produced over 40 documentaries for CBS and PBS, including two that were nominated for Emmy Awards. He also previously worked for the Ford Foundation as an officer in the Media, Arts and Culture Program. He was the first Mexican-American Rhodes scholar and holds a degree in English Literature and Language from Oxford University and in Philosophy and Literature from the University of Notre Dame. He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University. Santos recently returned to his hometown of San Antonio after 21 years of living in New York. His book Places Left Unfinished at the Time of Creation was a finalist for the National Book Award and in 2006 was selected for the "One Book, One City" reading program in San Antonio. I have three of his poems this week from his book Songs Older Than Any Known Singer. New Sun In a scintilla of Coahuila sunlight, so amber at the end of the day it becomes a kiss that lasts an hour, I want to fall, silent and fierce like a meteor made of lunar ice, an arrow point of flame, careening without flesh, musculature or bone, lighting on the thorn of a flowering cactus. When these hills were covered in salt water salamanders the color of Tlaxcala jade dreamed such a light would someday come, and their dreaming made it happen. When coyotes first spilled the blood of rabbits and that day ended a deeper red than ever before, the ancestors commemorated that time as the first day of our new sun. Though Coahul sky, I fall for centuries twirling in whirlwinds of butterflies and feathers. the stars rise the color of pomegranate seeds and stones rumble all along the infinite sierra. Texas Here, the oak claims it true dominion. Here, the cactus deserves a purple blossom, I saw the falling light of the stars, the shells of ancient bees, for the first time, here. I'm leaving again...who knows how long At the Hill of Old Boots Little Fidencio swung the bull-roarer, and it sang in wide arcs, con la voz de dios, basso profundo, swift and thunderous floating on the treetops in a whorl toward a silvery dusk horizon. There was no chile pequin this year. No wild mountain oregano. Frozen in May, the peach trees were blooming in October , and the mariposas monarcas, didn't migrate south through the serrania, as they had since creation time. "Such are these days," my Uncle said. "You have been away a very long time." Looking at old photographs from Oaxaca, "Grandfather was puro Indio," he said, "Mixteco o Zappteco." Out of that time, he was poised now in an everlasting stare, moreno, dressed like a charro on a horse, his saddle filigreed in bright maguey thread. Many years before, my cousin and I had fed flies and crickets to ranch spiders, until they were too fat to spin their webs. Remembering this, years later, I left my boots behind, like penance. This morning, I put them on again. Then we rode out the trail to El Milagro, and el tio said, "These hills never change in a thousand years." Then I looked across the rolling summits, softened ages ago in the briny velvet wash of an ancient receding sea, and the dawn star was still shining flickering its perpetual light.  Never getting enough of our friend Teresa, here's our number 4 poem by Teresa White Ferris Wheel Yellow carnival blades whirl above us. Midway goes on for miles and every barker wears a red and white striped vest. We climb up a rickety platform, welcome the silver bar and rise so high the countryside is visible all the way to the mountains. We really need to go there someday. Propane is good as two sticks and I'll carry the collapsible stove, you, the water for streams are not so easy to come by and who knows how long it might take to reach the summit? But here, above the crowd, we do nothing but rule. We own the world and all that is in it.  The nice thing about winter around here is there's something new every day, not like summer, which is like a season in hell every day - the only difference day to day being how close you sit to the gate. watching the ice imps play north winds again today - blowing strong and cold straight down from Montana and the Rockies, picking up leaves finally fallen from their trees and sending them swirling down the street like little ice imps at play if i was a longhorn i'd be huddled now against a south-facing fence instead i'll be staying inside at my window, watching the ice imps play  Next, I have several poems from the anthology One Hundred Poems from the Japanese, edited by translated from Japanese by Kenneth Rexroth, published by New Directions in 1964. The first two poems are by The Monk Noin who lived in the eleventh century. After the storm On Mount Mimuro, The colored leaves Float like brocade On the River Tatsuta. ~~~~ As I approach The mountain Village Through the spring twilight I hear the sunset bell Ring through drifting petals. The next poem is by Fujiwara No Sadaie, an Imperial Vice-Counselor who lived from 1162 to 1242. You do not come, and I wait On Matsuo beach, In the calm evening. And like the blazing Water, I too am burning. The next one is by Lady Otomo No Sakanor who lived at the beginning of the eighth century. You say, "I will come." And you do not come. Now you say, "I will not come." So I shall expect you. Have I learned to understand you? In the book also are some of the more famous haiku. The first two by Basho. Autumn evening - A crow on a bare branch. ~~~~ Summer grass Where warriors dream. This one by Kikakku. A blind child Guided by his mother Admires the cherry blossoms. This one by Issa. In my life As in twilight, A bell sounds. I enjoy the freshness of evening. And, finally, this one by Ryota. No one spoke, the host, the guest, The white chrysanthemums.  The haiku, or, hokku, were originally written as the opening stanza of a longer poem. By the 17th century, the short poem was beginning to be written as a standalone poem of its own. Basho and his schoool of poetry were very important in promoting this change. Basho, himself, was deified by both the imperial government and Shinto religious headquarters one hundred years after his death because he raised the form from a playful game of wit to sublime poetry. The haiku continues to be a popular form of poetry, with changes over the years and across cultures. Here are three examples of a modern, American, application of the form. These three delightful little pieces are by our friend, Alice Folkart. Three Darkness fell no thud, no boom, just quiet in the room. Sun rests behind the mountains everything is purple. Moon brighter than it should be what does it know that we don't?  And finally, all good things coming to end, here's our final piece for the week by Teresa White. But keep watching, she will be back again sometime. The Iris Blue lips invite the dip and taste of bees who would go berserk if they could not enter her. They bumble inside, lay waste to her sticky yellow grape. There is a quiver so brief I fail to turn and see this fleeting matrimony.  The next piece by Karl Heinzelman is from the Fall/Winter 2004 issue of Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. Heinzelman is executive curator for academic affairs at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, as well as a professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin and a resident faculty member at the James A. Michener Center for Writing. Ode to a Toaster It is not true Edison invented you before the light bulb, though who knows? - thermodiffusion, as from a switched coil, is less complex than incandescence if less ancient than fire. You were my first gift to myself, costing not less than twice what you now do, and yet I have lived without your apple-cheeked kind going on thirty years. Now my father is dead I will say he never knowingly told a lie though he spoke sometimes of Edison as his contemporary, promoting for thirty years the Power & Light's electrification of rural America and from time to time of you as the world's first small appliance. He kept after my mother died their old GE four-slicer, a fire hazard with its worn cloth cord taped all the way down to its antique unsealed plug but which still turned each slice a just brown right to the end when I gave it to Goodwill along with his Reddy Kill-O-Watt tie clasp and matching cuff links, things which had come to seem too odd to go on finding places for, as is the way, perhaps, with radiance and the things it raises to the power of air or light.  Wish I could say the day I wrote this poem ended up with something really cool. But, it did not. The next day though was something quite unexpected, the hike up Enchanted Rock, so I guess the poem was right, just a day off. spiders dancing the tree, its bare wind-dancer limbs black against the new-day sun, like a spider on its back waving spindly legs at the rush of warming light it's that kind of day, so fine spiders lie on their backs to bask today i, too, will do unexpected things  The next poem is by Gary Snyder, from his book danger on peaks, 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, published by Shoemaker Hoard. The book was Snyder's first collection of new poems in twenty years. Snyder is the author of sixteen collections of poetry and prose. Since 1970 he has lived in the watershed of the South Yuba River in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 and was a two time National Book Award finalist. He also won the Bollingen Poetry Prize and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award. Glacier Ghosts Late July: five Lakes Basin & Sand Ridge, Northern Sierra A lake east of the east end of Sand Ridge, a sleeping site tucked under massive leaning glacial erratic propped on bedrock, bed of wood bits, bark, and cones. chilly restless night, - ants in my hair * Nap on a granite slab half in shade, you can never hear enough sound of wind in the pines * Piko feared heights went up the steep ridge on all fours. But she went. * Catching grasshoppers for bait attaching them live to the hook - I get used to it * a certain poet, needling Allen Ginsberg by the campfire "How come they all love you?" * Clumsy at first my legs, feet, and eye learn again to leap, skip through the jumbled rocks * Starting a glissade down a steep snowfield they say, "Gary, don't" but I know my iceaxe * Driving in the perched lake, coming up can see right over the outlet waterfall distant peaks Sierra Buttes * Tired, quit climbing at a small pond made camp, slept on a slab til the moon rose * ice-scrape-ponds, scraggly pines, long views, flower mud marshes, to many places for a wandering boulder to settle, forever. * a gift of rattlesnake meat - packed in - cooked on smoky coals how did it taste? * Warm nights, the lee of twisty pines - high jets crossing the stars * Things spread out rolling and unrolling, packing and unpacking, - this painful impermanent world. * Exploring the Grouse Ridge - crossing through manzanita mats from peak to peak - scaring up grouse * Creek flowing out of Lake Fauchery old white dog caught in the fast current - strong lads saved him * Coming back down the trail from Glacier Lake KJ lifts her T-shirt "look, I'm getting boobs" two tiny points, age nine. * Down in the meadow west end of Sand Ridge the mosquitos bite everyone but Nanao and me - why? * Sand Ridge How you survived - gravelly two mile lateral moraine of sand and summer snow and hardy flowers always combing the wind that crosses range and valley from thesea. Walk that backbone path ghosts of the pleistocene icefields stretching down and away, both sides  The French Toastmeister does his thing. another Sunday going down it's a blue-sky Sunday morning, clear and cold with not a hint of the fog that wrapped every morning last week in a tight, wet shroud as on many Sunday mornings, i have been appointed Maker of Sunday Breakfast and i'm just waiting now for She Who Appoints to return from mass known, as i am, by those who count, as the best maker of French toast in the Western Hemisphere, French toast it'll be this morning, and a handful for each of us of those little smokey sausages, half of them burnt to little crisps so that She Who Judges will be assured they are done and the other half, my half, done properly, they do call them brown, not black, and serve after all leaving it then to a matter of careful timing, a plan built around the uncertain factors of which priest is running the show today of how long he’ll want to hear himself talk mass is timed to be over by 9:30 - if it's the old guy with bad feet it'll be over by 9:15; if it's the young guy who hasn't got over himself yet it'll be closer to 9:45 - either way, i time breakfast to be on the table by 9:40 if it's cold when She Who Seeks Always To Atone For My Sins gets here, well, she can just take it up with that full-of-himself-priest ~~~~ breakfast done, we'll head out for Borders and an hour or so with my Sunday Times then an early movie - "Invictus" today - and home for a nap another Sunday going down  And so the new year is begun. I'll be back in a week with a new post and goodies as yet unknown to me. Until then and as usual, all material in this blog remains the property of it's creators. However, I release such material that is my sole creation to whoever might want it. Please credit me if you use anything. I am allen itz, owner and producer of "Here and Now" and I have made it so. |
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