The Old Mule

Rain Sunday April with Plans

A good day.

I read of bit of Aristotle this morning. I am going to re-initiate the school of peripatetics -- walk around and muse reverently on the general state of things, color of a ship, the shape of flowers, a woman's hips. Analytics. The dialectic of kicking a rednecks ass, or pondering the weight of a hangover. There is bright joy in knowing. Or so I will teach.

Anyway, I am headed out Southwest in two days. No plans, just a good, heart widening wind in the face.  A rental car. Not much money. Several cans of soup. Through New Mexico, a place I do not know, down along the boderlands, across aztec plains, a maze of high dry openness. Lot's of pot and crystals. Aviary pools in warmed springs. Vernal springs. Indian country. I have a thin sleeping sag and a few pairs of new socks. Not much wrong can happen when a person is wearing new socks.

It is good for a man to open his lungs, set off the heft of dailyness, get out from beneath the roar of all the children and their mothers. The plans, the plans.

It is a good thing for a man to get out and walk around.

 

Robert Herrick

A Sunday kind of poem. For the ladies.

--

"To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time" by Robert Herrick. Public domain.    


To The Virgins, To Make Much Of Time

Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a flying:
And this same flower that smiles today,
   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious Lamp of Heaven, the Sun,
   The higher he's a getting;
The sooner will his Race be run,
   And nearer he's to Setting.

That Age is best, which is the first,
   When Youth and Blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
   Times, still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time;
   And while ye may, goe marry:
For having lost but once your prime,
   You may for ever tarry.

Better and Worse by Turns

I have never much cared for the poetry of Billy Collins. But this is the second time I have read this poem, and it just haunts me -- I really know what he is saying, what he is communicating. I think many of us have these thoughts from time to time. The ghostly purr of other engines, long since gone, still running. I have an old mountain house, and every time I pass through the upstairs hall, I feel arms and gowns envelop my interior. We live with all the others before us, to be sure. And they live with us.

Not that this poem is haunting; just good.


"House" by Billy Collins, from The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems

House

I lie in a bedroom of a house
that was built in 1862, we were told—
the two windows still facing east
into the bright daily reveille of the sun.

The early birds are chirping,
and I think of those who have slept here before,
the family we bought the house from—
the five Critchlows—

and the engineer they told us about
who lived here alone before them,
the one who built onto the back
of the house a large glassy room with wood beams.

I have an old photograph of the house
in black and white, a few small trees,
and a curved dirt driveway,
but I do not know who lived here then.

So I go back to the Civil War
and to the farmer who built the house
and the rough stone walls
that encompass the house and run up into the woods,

he who mounted his thin wife in this room,
while the war raged to the south,
with the strength of a dairyman
or with the tenderness of a dairyman

or with both, alternating back and forth
so as to give his wife much pleasure
and to call down a son to earth
to take over the cows and the farm

when he no longer had the strength
after all the days and nights of toil and prayer—
the sun breaking over the same horizon
into these same windows,

lighting the same bed-space where I lie
having nothing to farm, and no son,
the dead farmer and his dead wife for company,
feeling better and worse by turns.

Big Sur

I used to look out
from your back porch,
could see all the way up
the coast of California
or at least to the next
hard bend. Sunday, clear air
day, wind in warm season
grasses, bent, bending.
You had white dahlias
hung from a potting shed,
and I smelled gardenia,
picked one for your shirt.
We ate tacos from the back-
popped trunk of your station
wagon, dirt caked beneath
wheel wells, evidence of
your tear through Deschutes,
Three Sisters, Bend. We talked
of another trip south, always
something, beach camping
far enough down the line
to dim the fright of Ensenada.
So terrible hot you have to pass out
for sleep. And I dreamed that night
of off road buggies, steel cages
launched over tent and body,
gas and oil across the tarp
in a rainbow sheen, all the colors
of victory. Of near death, survival,
still here even when morning
makes your night ideas
seem like baited whales
cramped up near sunbathers,
burned and grinning. Drunk.

The Viking

It is Sunday, and I am headed out for a walk in the woods. The health food store started a brunch, so I may stop in and check out Beniot's tofu eggs. Not that I'm opposed to chicken eggs. But I am on a semi-health kick, and trying to prepare myself for ten days trekking in the desert heat. I am headed to the borderlands of Mexico and Southwest USA, and will travel the stretch of it from Texas all the way to California. Ground zero, in so many ways. I leave in two weeks.

I stumbled upon this poem this morning, and I just can't get the viking image out of my head. You'll see what I mean:

--

"Moondog" by Susan Donnelly, from Transit. Iris Press.

Moondog

He just stood there,
at the corner of 43rd Street
and Sixth Avenue,
nearly seven feet tall,
dressed as a Viking.
Everyone, it seemed,
in New York in the '60s
knew Moondog. They said
he'd been a stockbroker,
from a rich family.
They said he was blind.

I was writing a novel that year,
but didn't know how,
and falling in love,
and everything moved so fast,
but the Viking was motionless.
I know he wrote songs,
but I never heard any.
He just stared outward.
I'd wake up, write myself dizzy,
then go walking, fast,
through the streets.

One day, a stranger
stopped me: JFK had been shot!
This was in midtown. The bells
of St. Patrick's began tolling
and I joined all the others
going up the cathedral steps.
I'd seen the President
just last month — young,
glinting like silver,
in a limousine going up Madison
to the Hotel Carlyle.
He waved to all of us
and we waved back, cheering…

Or are these tears
for the broken love,
the unreadable novel?
Anyway, the years.

Directions to Larry’s Party

Go away
from the State House
and the Confederate Flag,
like you had a choice.
At Main and Blossom, turn left.
Keep going down Blossom
and keep on, and keep on.
Pass all the young couple
yuppie residences. Eventually,
you will come to a stop light
at Kilbourne. There is a Catholic
church on your left. Genuflect
if you must. You have to turn
right or left. Turn right
and then take an immediate left
onto Blossoomwood. Follow
Blossomwood until you come
to the second stop sign
and turn right there, Kalmia Drive.
We are 1490 Kalmia Drive,
which is the fifth house on the left.
Park along the street.
We are casual. You will
probably have to pour
your own drinks.

On Being Taught

It took all the way until April
before she slid her arms under
my shirt, pushed a wisp of hair
from her forehead. I felt the earth
slide on her sea of rock, compass
needles spin, north to south,
south, south. In the time between
coming up with something to say,
the right thing, and her second
plunge, I could have written
the tale of North versus South,
of the defeat, of fields of broken
hearts, letters and gasped sentiments
leapt in a last race to be heard. But
she pulled me in, again, and then let go
quick. An army of defeat residing
in the heart-filled mind of a young man
wrecked by simple touch. And in
my apartment, then, was still just me,
but the windows were now open, and
music played, and just as soon
as the words came to me, that Friday,
years ago, I think I may have died.

Spit Rainbow

by Melanie Schiff

Whitman

As usual, I could not agree more:

--

"Once I Pass'd through a Populous City " by Walt Whitman, from Selected Poems.

Once I Pass'd through a Populous City

Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my brain for future
    use with its shows, architecture, customs, traditions,
Yet now of all that city I remember only a woman I casually met there
    who detain'd me for love of me,
Day by day and night by night we were together— all else has long
    been forgotten by me,
I remember I say only that woman who passionately clung to me,
Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
Again she holds me by the hand, I must not go,
I see her close beside me with silent lips sad and tremulous.