The Old Mule

Travel and Other Homes

Sometimes I miss our sparse home in Oaxaca. The vista from the unfinished roof was a panorama of half-built houses, steel bars protruding heavenward, and the glorious saw of the Sierra Norte. Two long spined ranges confluenced at the edge of my gaze. These hills stretched down from California and North Carolina; distant places, far from home.

In these cloud strewn elevations, men lived with stout women in fog villages that smelled of smoke, places of hard-worn ease, true lives void of modern haste but hurried by each days labor and the brunt of time.

Closer in, there was a herd of musty dogs, the gray-beard man with his stick and goats, the swimming pool house with Sunday music, horses and hats. That Easter, from my lookout, I experienced the ambling movement of San Juanito residents snake up the unpaved track. They lashed the backs of infidels and even the one in thorns. I am no Christian, but I took pause.

There are paths which take us hence. We drive forward in awkward motions, swinging our own whips at time and chance. In the forgetful moments between worry and haste, our lives are lived and truly felt. That place to which we travel is never very far.

Not Yet Winter

This is as it should be: the clang of wooden paddles in some soup cauldron, a billow of smoke, a cackle, and the brightening to red that speaks of Fall.

Robert Bly

http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/docs/2004/09/27/#wednesday

The Waters and Older Things

Tonight the air feels heavy and full of history. A storm is upon us and our country has declared a past. I stare through curtains of humidity and glaze forward past bending trees. This is the experiment of anonymous nighttime windows. These are panes which seem to lead nowhere, but then flicker of life. Each night there is an eruption of darkness, non-being. Then pass the lines of covered dishes and cakes. A covey of cars plume south to the old lady’s house down the street. Even the witches paid due. This was no kind arrival; alas, as the items shifted out into big metal bins -- this was departure.

I can remember a time sweltering down the half paved road. The old Georgia school bus, many miles from home, shifted its weight from lane to lane. The Sunday market was an hour from town. Scratchy Mexican rancheros spiraled out of earshot. Flower print dresses covered bodies stout like barrel cacti. Long brown and silver braided women held turkeys by their jittery red heads. Tire sized bowls, earthen herbs, half ripe corn, cherries on stems, off-green fruits and twine covered the cathedral lot. That last Sunday we poked through the maze of tents and cord, clownish giants in hats and dark eyes, gently surmising our fate among such ancients: humility was our only chance. We skewered the rawest meats in a tin club of cowboy men and their brides. We ate plums on the stone side steps. We spoke of the waters and the movement of men. We laughed and turned back from the hills. I can remember a time sweltering down the half paved road.

The End of Summer

It is strange when things end. Every year, our globe circles many things. New manners are found and old ties are, finally, let loose.

It is the fading heat of summer's winds which speak in tongues most clear. The new year is among us. The salty depths darken and cool. The items of the past are brought forward before they fall, like puppet-ghosts at a carnival, into formless sheets of white.

1900 Galveston

In the month after August, 1900, the false security of the Galveston residents was treacherously betrayed. A large vessel became unmoored in the onslaught of 130 mph hurricane winds. Three bridges exiting the island were rendered impassable by the stray ship’s mighty hurdle. Ten thousand bodies soon would float upon the sea.

As always, greatness is made of bone and teeth and nerve. The residents were lulled by the calm song of a weatherman named Storm (seriously); he spoke of geography and nautical positioning. He fingered his unsupple lutes to the ship-tethered Odysseuns. And they sank with the noise, the violent foam, and all of the rest.

The waves must have crashed effortlessly during the wild undoing of the town.

I am a hundred years hence, and still am not able to draw the right mind painted dream. What was it like? How did it sound? Can our lives so quickly vanish with the rising of the sea? What does fate have to do with wind? Does water bring joy to sleep?

The sky here is yellowing with a late summer mist. The mosquitoes still bother. It is not yet Fall; it can not be. There is a bulky swirl just north of Jamaica. It appears like a ghost creeping through a spruce-blue forest, but with colors and faces and music self-sung. There must be some way out.

Our friend is sick. There are oceans tremendously long, but the earthly birds in our heavenly tree beckon our minds to stay. We will make soup, watch the ghost, and bang clean our muddied boots, fresh home from the coast, like water logged mittens or poor-made drums.

The weather that forms

There is always much to learn. Great storms render worried thought and inward speculation. We visualize currents and bended palms on foreign coasts. Scattering fish. Perhaps too, a man with a microphone jutting out beneath rain sheltering plastics and chemical coats. Our clothes are made of chemicals mostly, and we smell of it. But we stand before storms almost unknowingly, gazing at the creeping forms on our monitors, each torrents nature’s purest brew. The spin and tail of a momentous sea-creeping thing captures our world’s most incredible mathematical alignments. Will it finally rain?

Tonight there was a glorious waning moon. In other centuries, something grand would have been done -- must have been done. I noticed the glow en route to tonight’s fast food dinner. It hung there and graciously lent beauty to the buzzing luminescence of my beckoning menu. I pulled forward in grace, and received some sort of well wrapped bounty; alas, a little ashamed, but not overly so.

The deer leap through brush forests, I am sure. But I am no hunter, though I have slain. I am no marksmen with a home strewn bow. I do not dip from creeks with wooden buckets. I can not sneak forward, unheard and listening, feet padded in skin. But I do sip sugar water through tubes and gaze north, upwards, notice the moon, and pretend I am one with heavens both known and lost.