The Old Mule

My steps are longer these days, wider gait. Shirts are not as pressed (never were). There is enough on the book table bed side so that I feel obligated to stay focused, and my wallet is thin enough to get me out the door early. So little time to rest. But at the end of the road, one presumes it is never about the rest.

We floated in the river the other night cussing a bad motor. The old man from next door bailed us out but before he got there I had to really listen to the noise of a brackish river, Sunday nine pm. There was a racket of chattering, blue cats on the surface, water moving. Ducks. For most people the television is on and the worlds beyond the windows are only obtrusion of intermittent noise, sorry pranks to break the spell of fiction. But think what intrusion we are on them. I tried to stay silent in my white now-quiet flotilla, and we drifted toward panicum grass with tide against wind, powerless in a world of moving parts, and everything was alright. Everything was fine. So my steps are longer, and I know there is a sprint left before the walk is over.

I walked outside at two in the afternoon today and the sky felt heavy with the low clouds and cold, cold. I was not made for winter. Last Friday, after a long drive, I pulled the down yellow sleeping bag out to the couch and set the fireplace. The cat crept in. I slept for hours and woke up only to read a bit, Katz and his fermentation stunts (The New Yorker). I now have four cabbages and a pound of sea salt. But that's another weekend story. What I have now is this fast rustling storm that sets a man inside, one you want to look out of windows to see, glad you are not out in it. But really, we are all out in it. Deep as we ever thought.

Sometimes I look back through the pictures for something to hold on to. And I don't mean people or faces, not that they don't count -- they do, dearly. But it is the places, filled with bending trees, or the way an old car looks sitting out in a field, straw grass window high. It is the thin cut of an upland trail and the crack of a hand painted wall out of a breakfast city window. It is the sounds of a hundred horns, voices that blare at volumes distinct for their age. No decade plays the same notes. So when you reach back to hold on, everything moves.

There is danger in these tectonics. Our North is ever-shifting. And if the poles don't melt, our center brews in anaerobic turbulence. The core is molten and I know that from color school books. But I can not touch this, and it does not yet burn, so tonight I look through glass at winter limbs. There is truth in change, honesty in the vast cloud above us, tumbling past so it doesn't end as rain on some unplowed field in South Carolina. This is when is reach, and there is nothing to hold on to.

Gary Snyder knows something about this, I think. Every week or two I see what he might say:

--

Not Leaving the House

by Gary Snyder

When Kai is born
I quit going out

Hang around the kitchen – make cornbread
Let nobody in.
Mail is flat.
Masa lies on her side, Kai sighs,
Non washes and sweeps
We sit and watch
Masa nurse, and drink green tea.

Navajo turquoise beads over the bed
A peacock tail feather at the head
A badger pelt from Nagano-ken
For a mattress; under the sheet;
A pot of yogurt setting
Under the blankets, at his feet.

Masa, Kai,
And Non, our friend
In the garden light reflected in
Not leaving the house.
From dawn till late at night
making a new world of ourselves
around this life.

What a better way to start an odd day like this off than with a touch of Bukowski. This wayward drunk kept me upright through the better part of 1990. I am not going to hold him as mine, but sure I won't turn him loose either.

--

Charles Bukowski

the hookers, the madmen and the doomed

today at the track
2 or 3 days after
the death of the
jock
came this voice
over the speaker
asking us all to stand
and observe
a few moments
of silence. well,
that's a tired
formula and
I don't like it
but I do like
silence. so we
all stood: the
hookers and the
madmen and the
doomed. I was
set to be dis-
pleased but then
I looked up at the
TV screen
and there
standing silently
in the paddock
waiting to mount
up
stood the other jocks
along with
the officials and
the trainers:
quiet and thinking
of death and the
one gone,
they stood
in a semi-circle
the brave little
men in boots and
silks,
the legions of death
appeared and
vanished, the sun
blinked once
I thought of love
with its head ripped
off
still trying to
sing and
then the announcer
said, thank you
and we all went on about
our business.

"the hookers, the madmen and the doomed" by Charles Bukowski, from What Matters Most is How Well You Work Through the Fire. © Black Sparrow Press, 1999.

I have always loved the work of Louise Gluck. We read Wild Iris in the small independent poetry course I took in college, and even half-stoned I realized it was the pen of a genius. I recall that Gluck was a student of Stanley Kunitz, the man who I feel defines modern poetry more than any of the other doltish hacks. He wrote the shit out of it, and I clearly recall Kunitz bringing a whole tent of Dodge Poetry folks to absolute silence as he read a poem about his wife -- "touch me" and then I think he spoke about first reading Carolyn Forche, whom he "discovered" at Yale. There is this connection, then others, one after the other, but above it all there are clouds across a dark deep ocean, and words like these are there inscribed, if for nothing more than peaceful marine comfort, or something to think on, something to listen to if one falls of the boat, way off the boat:

--

Siren
by Louise Glück
I became a criminal when I fell in love.
Before that I was a waitress.

I didn't want to go to Chicago with you.
I wanted to marry you, I wanted
Your wife to suffer.

I wanted her life to be like a play
In which all the parts are sad parts.

Does a good person
Think this way? I deserve

Credit for my courage--

I sat in the dark on your front porch.
Everything was clear to me:
If your wife wouldn't let you go
That proved she didn't love you.
If she loved you
Wouldn't she want you to be happy?

I think now
If I felt less I would be
A better person. I was
A good waitress.
I could carry eight drinks.

I used to tell you my dreams.
Last night I saw a woman sitting in a dark bus--
In the dream, she's weeping, the bus she's on
Is moving away. With one hand
She's waving; the other strokes
An egg carton full of babies.

The dream doesn't rescue the maiden.

--

From the Oxford Book of American Poetry, University Press, page 903

It was 20 degrees, and in that kind of weather I promise you can feel the wind hit like a fist. But I can not remember time better spent in these mountains. We savored the minutes there, felt them slow to almost stall at three a.m. when the ground feels block-hard tight. Reveled by the stream for an hour, time so quick, lying out in the sun with boots off, socks hung on branches. Snow up high, snow and ice. Limbs clung to it on one side, then hung down a little as the cold sun melted ice, then froze again. We were the only footsteps heading in -- clinging to our paper soup bowls in that knowledge, nose over the steam of it all, the only souls on that side of the 150,000 acres, and our lack of sense was thus defined. But what we came away with is more than a man could ever find around any town. So that is where the sense is restored. There are places almost forgotten and even there the witch hazel blooms beside the most clear and real rushing trout stream, held up by big rocks and many many years of being out there alone. What happens when a mule finds love?

I really like this poem, especially since there is good rain out the window, weather feels October and I'm tired after a weekend near the coast, a full time that left my head spinning. There is so much new, and that is good, good. And on Gibbes Street, the lanterns still hang in the trees.

--

Old Men by Ken Hada

I make it a point now
to wave to old men I pass
old men standing in shade
of a yard, maybe
a daughter's place
where now he's just a tenant
trying to understand role reversal.

I raise my forefinger
As I steer country roads or pass
Through tired neighborhoods.
Most return a wave or nod Howdy.
Driving gives you some perspective,
shows you how you might end up.

We allow something
now, especially those of us sitting
on porch swings, those
who never got around to going
somewhere, those
who still feel like something
somehow is missing.

"Old Men" by Ken Hada from Spare Parts.

I always was so amazed by the poetry of Anne Sexton because it seems to have not really been written, but that somehow, through her, it just appeared. There is so little sign of folly, or edit, or writing. She has this way of putting forth her work in a spell of haunts, and this short poem is expertly so.

October, yes. Blue clear blue. After a most astounding weekend (with everything new, exciting again), I am preparing for a special time away, but not far, just away in the sense that Fall is well settled in the east, and the feel in the air is so right. Why then should a fellow not load up the car for a journey? There are miles of ocean, such stretches of sand, guitars and wading birds. But better still, it is the adventure in arriving someplace new, someplace you have been, but because of great shifts in tide, all appears different. Very different. This is where I hope to go.

--

Her Kind by Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

Messing around with the guitar and these days my fingers are worn, calloused on the left tips -- but that means good things are flying around the room, or at least songs. For years I left it alone, but something has pushed me into it deep, and that's fine. I remember a guy I met in Oregon. He used to come sit on our wide front porch beside the glass bottles we'd leave for the homeless gentlemen. Dude was from California and wore baggy jeans, pot-smoke teeth and had a tendency for trouble. He could not play for shit, but he'd pick up a half strung box and sort of strum along to these ribald lyrics or just words. Enough to make your side split. His best was the All the Tea in China song, written in water. Some people just have a lightness to them, his was more of a burdensome weight, but still foolishly un-heavy, so you just knew one day he would float away. He drove a cab and one afternoon I got on the radio and told the lady handling calls that I -- he, rather -- was tired of picking all these crazy rascals up and it was just time to quit. We laughed about that for days, and luckily he was able to patch things up, had to pull a few late shifts by the hospital. No one wants anything to do with a hospital, especially people from California. He and Bobby went to jail, but I don't think for long and anyway Bobby was the real bad one.

It is the good time of year, and everything feels better outside. Even early as hell, and across the ocean. The shuttered subway station in London (Sloane Sq.) was closed for a workers' strike. I waited at a bus stop for a bus that did not come, arms sore from the backpack, knees ready for a break, spirit quivering. The early english morning was almost up in to working hours, and I had to get to the airport. I tried to tap but banged on the door of a black cab, driver nodded back with a newspaper out. I said, a little too panicky..."where is Victoria," driver asked "the station?"..."yes the station, is it walk-able...?" and he thought for a second, adjusted his cap, said, with window on the up-roll..."mister, a man can walk anywhere." And so he can.

There is so much left to be done, and it's only October. It is time to open the windows, let some air in, sit down and really think about things. When you get to the bottom of it all, square back and find a good way to look it all right in the eyes. He is what I found: the boat don't steer, but she turns. Just hope the water
is wide.

It is a damn fine day here, and enough going on to makes a man's head spin. These are the days we wish we had later, so it is well time to get out and see what can be seen. In the meantime, here is a great poem by Rexroth. I sure wish I was in Newark this weekend.

--

Gradualism
by Kenneth Rexroth

We slept naked
On top of the covers and woke
In the chilly dawn and crept
Between the warm sheets and made love
In the morning you said
"It snowed last night on the mountain"
High up on the blue-black diorite
Faint orange streaks of snow
In the ruddy dawn
I said
"It has been snowing for months
All over Canada and Alaska
And Minnesota and Michigan
Right now wet snow is falling
In the morning streets of Chicago
Bit by bit they are making over the world
Even in Mexico even for us"

"Gradualism" by Kenneth Rexroth, from Sacramental Acts: The Love Poems of Kenneth Rexroth. © Copper Canyon Press, 1997.

Life changes with unforeseen fortune and enthusiasm, and just when you think something is for certain one way, it becomes clear that it is another. So don't walk off the precipice that a Monday in August can barely endure, wait until fall. The old growth discards and with a great force we stand with the breeze between our hips watching birds on the feeder. Or, another way to say it: shit changes. Hold on. Goodness abounds just after all the papers you dragged through seven houses and apartments burn, or are thrown away, or become lost. There is nothing we need more than an honest self, and a good reflection to hold up to our lover, to make the changes stick. Pull up a blanket, and keep the windows wide.

I read this tonight and knew right off that Mrs. O'Rourke is the kind of poet I most admire. This is excellent writing.

--

Apartment Living
by Meghan O’Rourke
from The New Yorker, September 20th, 2010, p. 63

So those despotic loves have become known to you,
rubbing cold hands up your thighs, leaving oily trails,
whispering, Just how you like it, right?
Upstairs the sorority girls are playing charades
again, smoking cigarettes, wearing shifts, burning
pain into their synapses.
Life is a needle. And now it pricks you:
the silver light in which you realize
your attempts at decadence
tire the earth and tire you. The etymology
of "flag" as in "to signal to stop"
is unknown. It is time to sit and watch. Don't
call that one again, he's pitiless in his self-certainty.
You used to be so.
You laid your black dress on the bed.
You stepped in your heels over sidewalk cracks.
You licked mint and sugar from the cocktail mixer,
singing nonsense songs,
and the strangers, they sang along.

-Meghan O'Rourke