The Old Mule

Cold. Rain. My kind of weather.

I read this in Found magazine, my new favorite rag:

The non-existent is that which has not been sufficiently desired. 

This sounds like something from "My Sister and I", which is a whole different can of worms, but one I read on warm grass in the park outside the science lab in college. I can almost see that curly-haired girl walking with her thin tshirt and flip flops. What was her name...she was much smarter than I ever hoped to be, and endlessly attractive.

Anyway, off to meditate.  

This is the perfect Wednesday poem. And now that the cold days have broken, I can put my mind back to the pentatonic scale, the north inlet route, Jackson Key, Wahkiakum County, or something with a daft sense of use and purpose. There is no time to waste, much to do. And the people who have come and gone are specters of who you might have been. But it is Thursday now, and time for a plan.

 

--

Sad Steps - by Philip Larkin

 

Groping back to bed after a piss

I part thick curtains, and am startled by

The rapid clouds, the moon’s cleanliness.

 

Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie

Under a cavernous, a wind-picked sky.

There’s something laughable about this,

 

The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow

Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart

(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)

 

High and preposterous and separate—

Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!

O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,

 

One shivers slightly, looking up there.

The hardness and the brightness and the plain

Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

 

Is a reminder of the strength and pain

Of being young; that it can’t come again,

But is for others undiminished somewhere.

2010, candles lit, arms limber and my raft feels taught strung, downriver gliding, huckfinnish and not a cloud in site (today), cold though, which was o.k. since a gentleman needs one good discomfort a day to worry over. Which I didn't for long, but instead pulled out my USGS NC maps and am in on a new route.

But first I have my gear set out for ice fishing, which in a way is an excuse to make my way far from any semblance of City, which, along with cellular phone waves, I find to be "capital" -the- croker sack of unhealth, fouled charm and general human misfortune. But the fishing, well, let's say one might call it an excuse, or a way to tie a hard hoisted arrow West to my future, realigned for magnetic declination, which is a joke anyway because I never have any clue where I'm headed, and I'm bad with a bow. But Missoula, then Portland, Seattle, Vancouver. I will get there.  

What I am trying to get across is this: new year / more adventure /cities can be fine / but a man needs to flee before he makes it home.

This is critical for the mental health of a being not designed for pavement and horns. Damn, I need to learn how to act in the midst of it though. And if I wanted to come up with a resolution, as is the custom of city dwellers, I would hope that every supper had was a meal well earned.

Tides swell in coastal rivers, and the raft bumps along. Before long, we dream. Goodnight.

In this mew year, and techno-revolving world plush with nature deficit disorder, or other incarnations thereof, I can only say that people like Snyder continue to provide a deep baritone of direction in this fog-mugged disorder of modern life. So, yes, this is going to be a good year. A good year.

Looking at Pictures to be Put Away - by Gary Snyder

Who was this girl
In her white night gown
Clutching a pair of jeans

On a foggy redwood deck.
She looks up at me tender,
Calm, surprised,

What will we remember
Bodied thick with food and lovers
After twenty years.

"Looking at Pictures to Be Put Away" by Gary Snyder, from The Back Country. © New Directions, 1957.