the old jones hospital

deep in dry leaves
under flowering magnolias
the old mower sleeps

finesse

From the poets perspective, Americans do not know the meaning of the word finesse.  For them power is everything, the raw sheer confrontation with the other, to whom they do not intend to submit. Their hypertechnical teacher has provided a largesse of domination that encourages its members to press home their material advantage.

                                                                                    -Alturas

            Conversely! the natural life -intent on rapport and reciprocation- makes the most out of what is already offered freely to it.  Always it seeks the threshold where not edge but equivalence can be realised. It does not want to turn the night into day; it wants to find what the night is made of.  Far from a desire to control everything, it invites &  delights in the natural course of things: accordingly finesse is always its preferred m.o.

July 2002

To be brazenly  a  bum
Unapologetic
Answering to no compunction
Of clock or calendar or skedull
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 quartz where the road ends
In Wyoming,
Silent lightning far-off--
Flashing in the blue Tetons

My Type

Your keyboard is more efficient
   but I'm fondly reminiscent
Of the chrome-and-black shine
   and the Remington ring
      at the end of the line...

drizzle

   '...drizzle' pretty much gets accorded third-class status in meteorological circles, rain but not really, unrain but not really, yet this AM when I walked up to the street to fetch my Bee I was greeted by a sublime atmosphere that sent a cold fresh spritz across my cheek, misting the town lights before me, and I felt nothing but christened by this new day, & lifted out of my sleepyheadedness into an indefinable euphoria- call it 'drizzle' if you'd like but I call it an unexpected visit from Grace...

far from home...

 Today my baptism came in the form of a driving sleet
 That caught me far from home
 My only shelter a scrawny digger pine
 That clocked me with snow-fragments!

the Cybernetic Revolution

     What to say about the cybernetic revolution that's added so much to our lives?
     Well, it's inevitable I suppose that human beings will continue to tinker, to create & foster 'application' that can do so much for all of us.
       But likewise!  that revolution has also subtracted something from our lives, something called the Solar Plexus.  That is, where in so many places a man had to rely on his own skills honed by experience and learning, now the GPS or a hundred other pods, pads, smartphones & apps can manage nicely, thanks very much.  Where before a man fell back on his own resources, the cybernetic domain has 'liberated' him & left him increasingly where technology's intended- left him with nothing to do.
     Call it progress if you will, but from where I stand a man's instincts, intuitions, resourcefulness- the self-reliance that makes him a man- have been sacrificed on the altar of productivity.

sunrise, sublime

Queuing up at dawn
In the eastern sky

A long ribbon of stratus
Hiding in the quarter-moon

Just tinged with first soft colors
Of sunrise--

It takes my breath away
Knowing what color

This raft of loose vapor
Will bring

Lord of the Rings

     When I told them violence & endless fighting in “Lord of the Rings” offended me they said “come on Craig, it’s only a movie.”
     Okay, it’s only a movie. But it’s been remarked before that most cinema is directed toward 15-year-old boys.   Which means, long scenes of fighting with as much graphic death and destruction as possible. I can put up with a modicum of this imagery if it contributes to development of the storyline, but in the ratings it soon becomes apparent that–for all the cutaways to Frodo and the Odyssey of the Ring, which is darn violent itself– this brutality depicted IS the storyline. Forgive me, but I find my adult sensibilities insulted by ceaseless murder and mayhem that’s directed toward adolescent boys. If that’s a natural and healthy part of human development, so be it; but the site of a large audience cheering on the increasingly gruesome battle disturbs me. If we’re appalled by the violence in today’s society, why do we celebrate and glamorize it in our entertainments? Yes “it’s only a movie” but when violence is viewed on screen as a solution to conflict, where else in life does it get legitimacy and approbation? Is this what we want to share with our children, chuckling at the man on fire who runs in the throes of his demise?
     Afterward I walked out of the theater shaking my head at the technical wizardry of the cinematographers, whose many dreamlike scenes were so hauntingly beautiful. It showed me what’s possible for the artform. But so much of it–as depicted in The Rings–is wasted on graphic butchery and devastation–severed heads being catapulted into the “City of Kings.”
    “ Come on Craig it’s just a movie.”
                                                 
-journal, 12-25-2003

violence and Jesus

     The point is, I don’t think it possible (perhaps not even desirable) to remove violence from human affairs. Ritualized violence like football or WWF helps to gratify the lust for bust, but by the same token legitimates conquest and supremacy. In fact, it appears that the urge toward violence is primary and elemental, and has formed nation-state in Empire, based on what else? The rule of might.
     If there is a way to transform violence into respect and regard, it is through the alchemy of the heart: Jesus taught us “to love thy neighbor as thyself.”  Resist not evil, turn the other cheek etc. When Jesus claimed he brought not peace but the sword he meant to excise the martial temper that enforced the Pax Romana. And a transcendence of material culture that divided men: the worship of Mammon. But these so-called Christian churches have not taken Jesus seriously: they have fallen into the accommodation that he warned of. They have enshrined the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory as the Lord’s Prayer- burying the battle-dead at sea.
     If Jesus represents anything at all, it is transcendence of the secular. Why? Because the secular is sourced in one thing: reactivity. The wisdom of the heart acknowledges first of all one humanity that runs through each of us that we know because it readily shines as one emotion: love.

handyman hell

Money as my carrot
I pushed myself down the hard knock of physicality,
Earthquake tempering in the House of Richter.
Bloodied by old lumber,
Cement dust in the lungs,
Six days laboring in an El Cerrito basement,
Skulll repeatedly rung on floor joists,
Hucking plywood as shearwall-
Just to pay a few more bills.

Mexican journal

 If I hadn’t read Emerson in college
 I would have become a poet of mercurial evanescence:
 blowing snow and sobs in the night,
    tires rolled in ditches
       and broken plumbing–
 but having read him
 likewise do I know
 we were gods for a day


After the morning rains have ended and the clouds dispersed
the sun comes out
in the little terra-cotta patio
of the La Paz Hotel
shining in the bougainvillea
where the finches come to sing for 100 years



 How impoverished
 becomes the old iglesia
 when it has enough money
 to replace its bronze iron bell
 with digital carillons                    -Cozumel


 can’t be reduced
 rain on a green poncho
 shoveling sandbags




 Every new technology
 bursts upon the scene

 With this familiar routine:
 better! faster! more!

 Until it morphs
   into just another thing
     to pay for




Give thanks
social programming
has not yet mastered
its science

Though countless give themselves to Oz and his decimals
give thanks
moon    wind    sand
fall untrammeled & free
also me!




 in the cheap hotel downtown
    a hairpin
       left on the sink--


hammer-swing 
to fingers
holding eight-penny nails-
constructor of cusswords





 warm nights in Quintana Roo
 out to fetch some local brew
 strange to see Orion too
 in an unbuttoned shirt and beach shoe


 stick-legged flamingos
 wade steel-silver rain-ponds
 on the hotel’s roof
                        -Zuanajoly, Cancun


how came I to love
the way she chinned her pillow
slipping on the case


like my neighbors
I’ve left my key in the lock
how many times?



 the music of block and tackle hoisting buckets of wet concrete by Mexican laborers building the new hotel at Portofino reminded me of Cendrars
 the way odd sound Scott his ear
 but then everything in sunny Mexico reminds me of Blaise


 to shave
 or not to shave:
 who gives a damn?           


 here in the warm Caribe
 all the detritus of material life
 is stripped down to the low bank of cumulus
 highlighted with late sun
 over the outer reefs



 it’s probably just as well the natives
 don’t care about basura
 because if they cared
 then they’d care about other things
 like banning your swim
 across the harbor at dusk
 or padlocking access to roofs
 for moon watching
 or making you wear sandals
 at la cantina

                  -Cancun





 40 years of buzz
 turned his liver
 into was             

-angelo