Breaking Up

Breaking Up
for Laura Morton

Rain across Texas today didn't help
The sky so close to the mesquite earth
Weeping
Far as the eye can see,
Through towns like Marble Falls
Luckenback
& Fredericksburg.
Rain across the entire LBJ spread,
Muddy ran the Pedernales River,
The sun a distant memory.
I tried different tricks
To push her out of my mind,
"Get Present,"
"She's wound too tight,"
"Never would have worked"--
All failing equally.

-Austin TX, 2008

time

Time the cackling witch
Brings all things to flower
Then in half an hour
Leaves them in a ditch

bicycle

Perverse the Ludd
     turning pedal & chain
          down rough-patched

ditchtender backroads
south of Colusa

-joined by frolic
     of redwinged blackbirds
          fencepost to fencepost-

Perverse enough to imagine
this twelve-speed sculpture
as apex of human
engineering

A Date with Death

A date with death
On the high Wyoming plateau

Premonition in dreams,
December when the ground lay bare
And sunlight shone golden
On vast windy rangelands, 

Out of Rock Springs
Ominous snowclouds gather from the North
Sioux death-rattles in the bottom of the mind-

The pickup out of gas
Miles down some wrong turn
Where the road ends
Under swaying aspens

the poet & technology

     For myself
     The strident success of cybernetic technology we experience in these latter days represents only a continuation of its own foundations: refinement in the arts of acceleration & abbreviation.
     For myself
     & many others technology can be esteemed only when it turns that foundation on its head; rather than add to the stress & consumerism surrounding us it opens new vistas in human consciousness and embellishes our rapport with vast & wonderful Garden we call earth.

Q

       Last time
you were single-minded
                about anything?

Edward's Xing

Home by back roads
from North Columbia
in the warm mizzling April dark
Mazda floatingon headlight mists
wet gravel turns & straights-
glimpse of pine-tops
band of moonlight
over the dim pastures-
Coasting the river canyons
I caught the ninth inning
a fuzzy faraway Giants game
fade out by the bridge.
Stoppt in the middle
killed the engine
leaned on the rail
lost in the starry beauty
of deep Yuba night

handyman

Was he a plumber
Who wrote verse on the side
Or was he a poet
Who wrenched pipe & sighed?

           *  *

Whenever a felon
    lands in the can
He lists his employment
    as 'handyman'

         *   *

Thirty years in the trades
     comes the recognition
Few problems are orphans
     most have cousins & uncles

        *    *

Rather than return home
And get the ladder I forgot
I take crazy chances
Balancing on lawnchair & flowerpot

-gutter-sniping

livingston road

After a day of cold steady spritz
How the universe of pine-needles
Shines & dazzles
In the morning sunlight!
It erases any whisper of the past.
Pendant raindrops by the thousand
Sparkle red & green
Before a slight blush of cold air
Loosens them
And fills the forest with more shinings.
An ancient form of christening,
Yet speaking one word:
New.

Plato

    " Only the dead have seen the end of War "

Punta Gorda

Jangling down that beach road
In the old Baja beater
No windows
No doors
All gauges broken
A part of the sky & mountains
Spontaneous laughter
Rolls out of my throat
At this vastly improbable fortune

time

I would prefer, like all my reptile kind, the still space between clock ticks, sandbars in silent rivers; man's first mistake was ever to see time pointed somewhere beyond us.

-Loren Eisley

hi-tech?

     If we make no provision for fully entering The Present, what use is all this elaborate collaborate  toward "inventing The Future?"

chester street

Mere chance put me there-
Rolling two-by-eights
Across the garage rafters
Framing a new roof:
When the pale November sun
Got low between the cedar branches,
And shot vivid rays
Through the pink cirrus
Overhead--
Enough to make a man
Catch his breath
       & pause for a moment
In the constant beauty of things.

renewal

On the backside of Harmony Ridge
Where the University
          has found old bones
A rain-mist ribbons through the cedars
Drifts toward the river...

left out

Lanterns hung
   big party next door-
      not invited this year

dawn

Aurora
  deftly
    shedding
      her satin
        night-robes

Vera, Lake

             Tomorrow has been cancelled.

             A swoop of woodsprites

             jabbers in the pine-tops

             above my little red cabin

             as the bath fills with hot water –

             silvery woods at dusk

             where all things meld

             into an indistinct soft repose,

             including me.

             For an hour that has no seams

             there will be no dreaded consequence

             no Maxwell’s Silver Hammer

             poised above my head,

             all sins forgiven

             all fears forgotten.

                                                  -1995

stridency

    

       What emerges in an engineering culture- like ours- is a reckoning of the human body as a source of necessity and discomfort, which it intends to meliorate with its many appliances.  And it is tireless: a dynamic that never envisions any notion of 'arrival,' enamored as it with new, updated, faster.

carney

County fair-
The balloon-seller drunk
By the blue ribbon goats

Wanda on the Trades

"Oh I know it well-
One week it's turkey,
The next week it's feathers"

2 AM

A beer & a shot
Two-out-of three
On Lew's warped pingpong table

Eating chocolate cake
On Tahoe's summer shore
Criticizing America...

high country

A full moon rises yellow
Over great tracts of tundra
Near the 80th parallel:
Six hundred miles to the Pole.
Under a glimmering borealis
A young grey wolf drinks from a divot
On the road once used
As a shortcut to Nootka

zodiacal wanderings...

‘Air Sign'
 that is, until I get my geminectomy

then I wander the Astro Mall a free agent

perusing the dioramas 

         Libras and Aries and Taurii--

thumbing through the attributes

      ‘grounded’   ‘quick to judge’   ‘rational’

                                    ‘deliberate’—

but when all is said and scrutinized

The blue depths call to me…..

ah, Pisces

guadalajara

Locomotives idle at their sidings
The world over
The big Case-Hellwig diesels
At low rpms
Trundling the summer air
With a bass vibrato
Or occasional slow rev
Flashing what horsepower:
The steel-wheel'd gods
Bide their time.

street football

An old argument breaks out
     over the rush count-
          three alligators or four?

[for Lew Toll]

handyman

Rather than return home
    and fetch the ladder I forgot
I take wild chances
    balancing on lawnchair & flowerpot

Colors

The free-thinker, who shuns orthodoxies of every stripe, views the flags or 'colors' of the various nations with the same regard as the colors worn by street gangs: one dissolved into the the formidable Many

-Alvarez

ice-pond

Ron
Kon
Koma:

Non
Sequi
Tur

canyons

Coming to know
          the varied land
                    like the nose of a puma

-beckville

Alisdair

forgot his lunch
       now I have to give him
                half mine

sunnyvale

At the wrong station
     waiting for
          a nonexistent train

swan-levine

Deep in leaves

            Under flowering magnolias

                        The old mower sleeps

-Swan-Levine

northern rockies

To be brazenly a vagabond

Unapologetic

Drifting down the hours

Answering to no compunction of clock or calendar

Yes to have all the morning to oneself

And all the slow measure of afternoon
By evening sitting on a rough bluff looking over the Big Sandy
Or walking the starry bliss of crushed rock 
Where the road ends in Wyoming—

Silent lightning  flashing far off in the blue Tetons

-w/ Tricia 2005

debate

With raised voices
            the roof-carpenters
                        argue astrology

gold hollow

Up the steel rungs
            to swing my leg over
                        the STAY OFF DAM sign

-Lake Vera

*V

Poker winnings
            Pushed in his socks
                        When his wife knocks

How To Write Good

Exaggeration is a billion times worse than understatement.

Avoid alliteration always.

Prepositions are not words to end sentences with.

Avoid cliches like the plague (they're old hat).

Eschew ampersands & abbreviations, etc.

One should never generalize.

Comparisons are as bad as cliches.

Be more or less specific.

Sentence fragments? Eliminate.

I've told you a million times- never exaggerate.

Who needs rhetorical questions?

ISIS, etc etc etc

    what do human beings find more compelling than this inclination to belong to some larger association with others, magnetic enough to buy into the brain-contouring required, to leave one's natural skepticism at the door and submit to some or another stripe of orthodoxy?

Titanic

What world is this where hulls of glacial ice
Reprove the hand of man,
Christened steamers and their human cargo
Tumbling thirteen thousand feet
Into further blackness?
This no trifling world my friend,
I've seen the photographs,
Teak decks and life-rings under strobelights
In a place out of mind,
Two miles down.

time, reconsidered

Turn horizontal time inside-out & linear extension becomes deeply vertical; the counting of sun-orbits [weeks, months, years etc] morphs into the sun itself...

Like

pickup stalled

From the first days of Spring
to the wild land bring
    pansies in a basket
castles in the blue-green
   firmament & others
oddments like fragments
of cold chiseled stones & other
endlings
Cold runs the creeksplash
    under lowslung bridges
        & deer that forage too
in the open mystery woods
along dog bar dog bar dog bar
stone cabins where miners
    shot out iodine bottles
& broke the quiet of mornings
    in March    in March
wherefore whatfore the 3x5
rendezvous in unused settings
    "that's the way she bends"
says Conner in the flood times
of 1933
when no one lived, there

poetry & engineering

     Where does the poet fit into an engineering culture that has nothing but contempt for the actual physical world, that values not things-in-themselves but how they can be telegraphed into other "advantages"?
     Where does a poet fit into an engineering culture that projects time as horizontal in order to devise design & apply its ample abbreviates- a stridency that ironically defeats itself by fostering greater necessity & delivering not the fullness of time but rendering it a "fugitive measure"?

'Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.''

-Sylvia Plath

my view also

I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path. ... This is no magnificent deed, because I do not want followers, and I mean this. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth. I am not concerned whether you pay attention to what I say or not. I want to do a certain thing in the world and I am going to do it with unwavering concentration. I am concerning myself with only one essential thing: to set man free. I desire to free him from all cages, from all fears, and not to found religions, new sects, nor to establish new theories and new philosophies
-Krishnamurti

directions

how do we cope
without telephone numbers
scribbled on a 3d class envelope?

time

Time the cackling witch
    brings all things to flower
and in half an hour
    leaves them in a ditch

Zaca

Jangling down that beach road
in the old Baja beater

no windows    no doors
all gauges broken or missing

A part of the sky & mountains

Spontaneous laughter
Rolls out of my throat

Giddy
At my vastly improbable fortune

dreamy

    We reserve the word 'dreamy' to apply to that soft wind that arrives in the tropical heat of the Baja night, that runs across the Southern Ocean under a thousand Mexican stars & makes a little sleep possible on the flat thatch roof

Baja Revisited

After my return from the tip of Baja
And my delightful frolics
In that little corner of the ocean
That spans three-quarters of the planet,
I lean against my pillow
Under the old familiar bedlamp--
And when I lid my eyes
From a long day of travel
Voila! that underworld buoyancy
Comes streaming back,
Grains of sand float past my ears,
Buoyant also,
Specks by the thousand
black   &white   &gold mica,
a sublime hallucination.

sight

God’s sleek sword

Into the heart of the poet

Is this slender stranded

Optic nerve

That slays him

To every purpose

murphism #102

hammer-swing
    to close paint-lid
Zing! primer across my nose

frolic

Out the side of my eye

            I caught the high swing

            Of common seagulls

            Over Frobisher roofs

            South of San Jose,

            Merged into a mingle

            That turned to maybe hundreds,

            Loose,   aimless,   a chaos

            For its own delight

            That quickly became a sheer joy of flight,

            A winged camaraderie;

            “slipping the surly bonds of earth”

state park

In a circle
Around the ranger
children pass a bear skull

dawn-dream

The sea is calm,

No wind.

From dream I wake

At dawn,

Knees in limp kelp,

In a place of pink

And amber lights.

I cling to something

Undulating in slow swells,

Alone save for three

White terns

Asleep on the water.

you may say I'm a dreamer

I'd love to be present that inevitable day when the world has had enough of tanks & bombers & AKs & bleeding children & lays down their arms to rust & rot in the sun-shine, smile & hug each other like long-lost brothers, break bread & sing old songs,

That day will certainly come when the world will wake up & recognize militarism for what it is, Paranoia & Payback, & pronounces the word together, ‘enough! ’

Last Call

              In a separate action the Supreme Court upheld a ruling giving United States ownership of the ship's bell recovered in 1935 from a Confederate raider, the Alabama, sunk off the French coast in 1864.

            The Alabama had sunk at least 62 Union ships before it was attacked and destroyed by the vessel Kearsarge off Cherbourg.

            The bell was recovered in 1936 by a British diver from the Isle of  Guernsey, who sold it to a local bar in exchange for drinking privileges. The foot-high bell was used to sound the last call for drinks.

            The bar was destroyed by bombing during World War II, but the bell was later recovered from the rubble and turned up on the antiques market.

            A New Jersey antique dealer, Richard Steinmetz, said he paid $14,000 for it in Hastings, England, in 1979. The United States government laid claim to it three years ago.

                        The lower courts, and now the Supreme Court, agreed that the US government retains title to all Confederate property. 
-San Francisco Chronicle, 6/2013

the archivist

       The archivist may enjoy some passing pleasure from casting his thin strand into the stream of time,

       Admiring the soft patina it’s left on his trinkets,

       But the day will arrive when  both he & his artifacts will slide into that resistless  water bound for oblivion…

gravity

In the Asteroid Room

    a scuffle broke out

out of the blue

    I got moonrock’d

           for my lunatic shout

southern adventure

Bad spark plugs

            almost ended our trip in Virginny

A leaking camper roof

almost did us in in DC

            a big argument

 just about ruined everything

 in Biloxi...

 then – we ran out of money.

 Yet here we are somehow

 fat dumb and happy

 in N’awlins!

bus-ride

             an inveterate bus-rider I loved the cargo of bright angels, the press of the old woman’s arm to mine is about “all I can bear,” bus that unlike the swirl of cars is going nowhere, sunlight in windows as we pass Lloyd’s Muffler Shop, hiphop bebop black teenager next to me, I fingered the orange hole-punched Transfer like cryptic password money, bones lunge together at brakestop corners, smiling skeletons all, seafloor roadcut by Christ Lutheran Church, towtruck dog barks at me eye to eye perched up high, aggressive driver leans hard on horn but disregards heavy horn behind, big-ass accordion bus blocking traffic, kids skip rope in phonewire alleyways, here’s our stop, pigeon-swing House of Pancakes!

my type

Your keyboard may be more efficient

  But I'm fondly reminiscent

    Of the chrome-and-black shine

     And the Remington ring

        At the end of the line!

new 'ku

lining pennies on the track
sound of big engines
chugging up the gorge 


He's right 
most of the time 
but we forgive him

luddism (revisited)

Poets are those who believe
     technology's got it all wrong:
Instead of saving us time & space
     it's been against them all along

day-dream

   

I lidded my eyes
and found myself abruptly
a wide-winged pelican
descending in the glide of a dozen
drafting one for another;
our leader timed it
to skim a perfectly cresting wave-
as we reached the glassy comber
sailing mere inches
above its sunsparkled face
the sea collapsed with a gentle crash
& up we swept into the sky....
I opened my astonished eye.

new haiku

forgot his lunch
now I have to give him
half mine


in the parklot
behind the abortion clinic
discarded lipstick


old green schoolbus
abandoned in aspens-
what fates?


on my open page
lands an exquisite
blue dragonfly               / Lake Vera docks


brisk wind
scatters sun-diamonds
across the lake              / Lake Vera


sign at Ridge Feed:
Please Don't
Pick Up Chicks


a shed for goats
constructed from
piano crates                 /Tor House


lining pennies on the track
sound of big engines
chugging up the gorge               -Mukolmne HIll


He's right 
most of the time 
but we forgive him                 -for Steve H.

Lake Vera

Clanging up the steel steps
  To the top of the old dam
    Swinging my leg
      Over the No Trespass sign

crickets

Crickets.
Must be thousands
In this field of twilight grasses,
A chorus of violining legs-
This is their hour.
I've no idea
What becomes of them
Come the long icy months of winter,
But here in this warm evening
Of August
They thrive:  they serenade:  they joy.