The Old Mule

Rain today. It sends me writing. Much afoot. I just returned from a house up the street, talking about (and learning) the harmonized scale. Tomorrow makes 35. Thirty five. Good gracious. And next year will be tossed from a rope swing to the river. It does speed up. And I sat up all night yesterday thinking about Alaska. Alaska. Deep wood, sitka spruce, a long pond of quiet off from everybody. I don't need anything complicated. I just want to be left alone. And I aim to work that out, somehow. Alaska. Not to live, but to get lost in.

Going back a bit, I have always found myself more happy out of the city. Hands in dirt. Skin no longer clean. Humans take to the woods, but they forget to touch: the trees, the stones or water, the soil. I forgot too, but feel better dirty, and calm a bit that way. There is an excitement of City, but I was made for country. We all were, right? Prima facie. 

I found this old poem from notes I had written in a small hotel in New York City:

The Seventh Sea

 

Ship's bow heads

toward cool water

waves on side

hard wood, planks

strapped tight, room

lit by whale candles,

pans clank, a tap

of seaman's boot. We

sleep deep in this

night, dream in fathoms,

paddle with arms

over feet, over

anything to push

this wreck farther.

This is just a great photo -- Johnny Horton and Johnny Cash on the steps of a post office in Cleveland County, 1959 (Photo by Don Hunstein)

I can't quit thinking about these two poems -- two poems that I read from my phone in Seattle, Washington, which is odd considering poetry being read form a telephone at all, and even more odd given the circumstances of the reading, which, alas, is a more adventurous and maybe daunting story itself. Or, plainly, not fit for here. But I will say Olympia remains a pull in my life, and maybe it is the rain rain, maybe, or the dark soil and lightening high trees, or the faces, white minnows of eyes all the way against the coast. Like frogs climbing out of a tub, but enjoying it. Whale-hunters, clam-shuckers, banshee-stirrers, bank-men, brake-men and the like. Someone decided to move to the edge of the earth, and folks on the east coast decided not to. Beyond that, there is a feeling in the Northwest that the ship is ever-keeling, abrupt and always uneasy. With a stir and tumble, tides find Pioneer Square, and everything weighs of salt but tastes a bit more free. This is not the West, gentlemen, this is the North West. And the last time I visit will be the last time I make it through another long winter without some new plan of heading out. There is always the howl of a good high hill getting lonely, and there is always the restless edge of somewhere just up the road.   

Poems from a few days near Olympia:

Tracks

by Ted Kooser

Using a cobbler's shoe last

I found one summer at a yard sale,

and the heavy leather uppers

from cast-off boots, a jigsaw,

some wood, an awl and thread,

and a few evenings sitting alone

thinking of you, I have fashioned

a pair of red valentine shoes

with heart-shaped wooden heels.

Look for my tracks on your doorstep

where I stood with sore feet

through the evening, too timid do knock.

"Tracks" by Ted Kooser, from Valentines. © University of Nebraska Press, 2008.

--

Who is Silvia? what is she,

 by William Shakespeare

 

Who is Silvia? what is she,

   That all our swains commend her?

Holy, fair, and wise is she:

   The heaven such grace did lend her,

That she might admired be.

 

Is she kind as she is fair?

   For beauty lives with kindness:

Love doth to her eyes repair,

   To help him of his blindness;

And, being help'd, inhabits there.

 

Then to Silvia let us sing,

   That Silvia is excelling;

She excels each mortal thing

   Upon the dull earth dwelling;

To her let us garlands bring.

And "Who is Silvia? What is she,..." by William Shakespeare. Public Domain

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.

Just back from an almost unspeakable adventure in Everglades and Key West, and re-packing for the cabin in the mountains. Three hours home. Many miles on my truck.

At a roadside motel, I did read this obituary of sorts that HST did for Rolling Stone many moons ago. The subject was his co-partner in crime, Acosta. This is a fine piece of work, and I hope someone writes about me this way (for the most part) when I turn to dust:

H. S. Thompson “The Banshee Screams for Buffalo Meat”

from Rolling Stone 254; December 15, 1977

 

When the great scorer come to write against Oscar’s name, one of the first few lines in the Ledger will note that he usually lacked the courage of his consistently monstrous convictions. There was more mercy, madness, dignity and generosity in that overweight, overworked and always overindulged brown cannonball of a body than most of us will meet in any human package even three times Oscar’s size for the rest of our lives—which are all running noticeably leaner on the high side, since that rotten fat spic disappeared.

            He was a drug-addled brute and a genuinely fiendish adversary in court or on the street—but it was none of these things that finally pressured him into death or a disappearance so finely plotted that it amounts to the same thing.

            What finally cracked the Brown Buffalo was the bridge he refused to build between the self-serving elegance of his instincts and the self-destructive carnival of his reality. He was a Baptist missionary at a leper colony in Panama before he was a lawyer in Oakland and East L.A., or a radical-chic author in San Francisco and Beverly Hills…But whenever things got tense or when he had to work close to the bone, he was always a missionary. And that was the governing instinct that ruined him for anything else. He was a preacher in the courtroom, a preacher at the typewriter and a flat-out awesome preacher when he cranked his head full of acid.

            The Brown Buffalo ate LSD-25 with a relish that bordered on worship. When his brain felt bogged down in the mundane nuts and bolts horrors of Law or some dead-end manuscript, he would simply take off in his hotrod Mustang for a week on the road and a few days of what he called “walking with the King.”

            Oscar was not into serious street-fighting, but he was hell on wheels in a bar brawl. Any combination of a 250-pound Mexican and LSD-25 is a potentially terminal menace for anything it can reach—but when the alleged Mexican is in fact a profoundly angry Chicano lawyer with no fear at all of anything that walks on less than three legs and a de facto suicidal conviction that he will die at thirty-three—just like Jesus Christ—you have a serious piece of work on your hands. Specially if the bastard is already thirty-three and a half years old with a head full of Sandoz acid, a loaded 357 Magnum in his belt, a hatchet-wielding Chicano bodyguard on his elbow at all times, and a disconcerting habit of projectile vomiting geysers of pure red blood off the front porch every thirty or forty minutes, or whenever his malignant ulcer can’t handle any more raw tequila.

             

Christmas soon. Then off to the everglades for a real kayak adventure. Then to the mountains for time in the place I enjoy most.

Here is a great poem for Thursday, by Margaret Atwood:

- -

You Are Happy  by Margaret Atwood

The water turns
a long way down over the raw stone,
ice crusts around it

We walk separately
along the hill to the open
beach, unused
picnic tables, wind
shoving the brown waves, erosion, gravel
rasping on gravel.

In the ditch a deer
carcass, no head. Bird
running across the glaring
road against the low pink sun.

When you are this
cold you can think about
nothing but the cold, the images

hitting into your eyes
like needles, crystals, you are happy.

"You Are Happy" by Margaret Atwood, from Selected Poems 1965-1975. © Houghton Mifflin, 1976

In Montana the streets

are covered in ice, and we

dip into the country bar

with two nights to spend,

rolling about,  stories

and the mystery of all

those years. You were

the chef, chief lady steam

in sentences Quechua

or something unknown,

I was tired of the everyday,

cities wide, tree deprived

and no hearth-lit warm

room, instead oakwood

chairs unstained and a plate

wrapped in foil. No country,

no seasons. You slide the stage

across November, curtain

hangs, cord cotton taught.

You call this walk through

fields, so lonely, but I feel fine. 

--

I wrote the idea for this in a journal from May 29th 2007, when I was down at the farm cutting back the azaleas with the fellows.