The small, brown desperate bird lived outside our confinement. We watched it land furtively on the white table. We stood next to your sea and you knew what it was you wished to show me. Count my meter and count my rhyme, you sang in time to the blues behind the coffee counter. Life existed there, as I’m sure it does today. People with faces distinct from every and any other, infinite variety and so human, and you wept with joy. The bird knew this of you and grew less worried. We ate the sandwich which gave us life and our bird found an affirming nugget. It ran from the others and launched into a brilliant flutter from one ledge to the other, we by your sea knew it. The bird’s friends were acquisitive – holding on were they to the only element they knew – but our new friend successfully defended. It jounced with nervous wings to the edge of the concrete ledge, high off the sloping ground, easing to your sea. It turned its back to us and settled its accounts, a quick inventory entered into a tiny brain, acknowledging by nibbles. The morsel should, barring that freakish accident of fate and luck, give it life for another day, easy. You turned your face to the sun, satisfied before your own launching off the ledge that you’d seen it, that something. It was hot in our world, on those heated days of our best moments. The little bird bounded from what we’d imagined was our box; it leapt and held its wings tight to body, not for flight, and fell like a rock into the lost abyss...
The First Man Who Had No Choice
Breathe life into life again, this looking ahead. I sense a resurrection, can see a man climbing out of temporary death toward an angel’s flight toward promise and hope, realization, divine. Ride the tide of this fresh momentum, exerting on the climb and allowing the downslope slide, in and out I can take rejection, don’t entertain dejection and never take failure too seriously. A secret performed for me. By the many before all of us who did it, exhibited. It is plain to see, during the color of my current stretch of hope, that I know what I’m doing. They will say yes this time and the readers fall in love with it and it will sell, our relationship gel, and I’ll be able to continue the climb of work, of manhood, of husband, of friend, of creative beating heart. Belief and faith may not be neglected, but nature speaks in funny waves sometimes, shutting down, knocking down, reminding you of how hard it is to get back up. Facing what? The sharp storm? The lightning strike on a small alpine boy? The crashing, clutching ocean wave? Your own invented obstacle? Cast aside, as the first divine, the initial inspiration, that first man who had no choice. Be that person without a choice, from hope to hope, and failure to more of the same, to failure as part of the game, making your nest, loving your friends, besting the rest. Solitude and determination, a fight for life, that graceful stand that is a living man’s allowance, alone barefoot on silken moss in the darkest possible wood.
The Library
Books contain communication and we earnestly wish for one another, for company, for acknowledgement, for a friend’s tender hand during night and storm; open, close them, rest on the desk, on the floor, in stacks and on the long shelves a lifetime could not encompass; I know Rome, there, and toss a book as a Frisbee here is Paris discussed; the young and some peppered others, heads bent, read and read hard, some at war and some for fun; learning, and I’d love to capitalize that, knowledge the same; on the fourth floor with cubicle stations and broad tables and papers spread about, pen a nervous flickers, behind glass where talking is encouraged and trigonometry finds its way to a blackboard, professors communicate dropped classes and access codes; books in this building, a large container for the bound containment, somehow a binding that sets us free, or, depending on circumstance or interpretation, weighs down upon us because it’s forced; not this one: I spin in the opposite direction, always, it is enlightenment and pleasure; drinks contained under lids are fine but not food; here we eat of other things, like the liquid food of a Samaritan, or Italian pilgrim on his mountain climb; here primarily a secular vision, humanist, a way of looking; shelves between the tall mountains and the sea, briefcase wireless internet laptop pigtail tennis shoe flip-flop pants baggy or tight, squeezing the fleshy container into which we pour our fine communion.
I Am Nature and Show Mercy
I am nature. And I think. There’s no need to solve that problem. For a long time I’d imagined we should. No way. You are nature and you think. She was sleeping next to me and her mouth was open. The spider walked across the ceiling above us. “Don’t do it,”I said. Ordinarily I don’t flinch. But I’ve a spider bite and it’s infected and this gal above us appeared as on a hunt. It was directly over my wife’s mouth. The spider dropped and landed on her shoulder. It paused, waiting. I snatched a sheet of paper and encouraged it. It ran along the paper and then jumped to the bed. I chased it around the room. I was protecting my girl and I possessed a bite. This gal was wily. “You look guilty,” I said, and I crushed it. One out of two hundred spiders and I consider myself merciful. I’m not interested in what they say in Thailand or Tibet. I am nature; I exhibit mercy and the cold-blooded. A mosquito flew by; I allowed it to pass. She did, flying. I continued to read next to my warm, innocent friend in her pink pajamas. A funny-bodied insect flew and landed, paused, wiggled, and then breezed off; I was calm and all-seeing. Another or the same bloodsucker hovered in my peripheral; I was engaged with bananas in Guatemala; my airspace was violated. I snatched with my left hand, grabbed the mosquito out of the air, in one move slammed it to my sheets on the bed, set the book down and flicked my first finger; it catapulted to the closet. I am nature and I am.
To the Basement with Other Sick Dogs
Of course it’s purposeful that they send you to the basement in order to access the laboratory. With other sick dogs. Holding pattern dogs, howling at the closed dungeon walls. I hunted for a staircase and there was none. Early outside in the dazzling springtime sunshine on the mountains the flowers and the sea, and thought we would beat the lab rush. I stood next to an ancient couple. The elevator doors opened and we stepped inside. Press “B.” The elevator snatched us down and stopped. The doors opened and we were cautious; we looked around the corner and saw that we had not beaten the lab rush. There were old people drooping in their chairs, spreading joy. Motorcycle magazines on the table and People; the Newsweeks were taken. A stooped and withered woman in a white wool sweater with an old chicken-skin hand reached for the motorcycle magazine, brought it to her eyes, and stared at it for a long while. Then she returned it to the little coffee table. I checked in; a nurse came out, looked down at her chart, and called a name. A person went with her. One old, thin man, probably ninety, held his wife’s arm. They looked cute, the kind of cute that attracted the entire room; people cooed as you would for an infant. The old man led his wife to the back room and they sucked some blood. The Latina nurse mispronounced my name, badly enough so that I didn’t know it was me; my blood entered tubes and flowed and they can tell so many things.
The Missionaries from Baja Must Have Known
Woke early as the sun angled to our south-facing-ocean left, coloring eyes vivid, and green branches and terra cotta and the fresh gang of walkers under the palm trees downtown, in order to drop Silby at the bus that would take her to LAX and she flew away for two weeks. Taking advantage of this early start, worming it, I drove to the lab for my late tests; supposed to be tested two months ago as we monitor the kidneys which are unraveling as I write and you read and we dance our mortality. I watched the red and purple blood flow. Taxes they say are one of two guarantees; the other heading this section: I dropped off signed copies and retrieved our returns from the accountant. I drove to the nearby ATM and deposited a check and remembered to bring a pen from the car. The car drove me into the slanting light – amazing what one can accomplish so darn early in the excellent living morning – along Mountain Drive and I turned into our lane. The wind was blowing and I saw them then. First fifty, then hundreds, and over the next three hours, as I sat on the deck and watched them, in deep, scorching sunshine like the missionaries from Baja must have known, thousands upon more thousands of Monarchs flutter-bying, in a hurry, going somewhere. Like an animated sped-up film of the insect world. I stood in their path and they swerved to avoid me as they would a tree. None stopped to browse the nectar around us; they flew, many wings intense, purposeful.
One Night I Breathed and Saw the Moon
One night I breathed and saw the moon. It was there above me; I saw it as I stood on the hill. One day I watched the frothy, moving shore, and the sun set as it does on life. I breathed and I saw Orion above me. During that one time I had. I stood on one leg, on the hill, and I did figure eights around a manhole, with a view over the city lights below, and the full moon lights up the world so that trees and flowers and hills were visible. I breathed and saw a shooting star; I breathed and played with the Big Dipper behind me, dipping; I breathed deeply and engaged my favorite, Pleides, sisters seven and walked in circles; that one time I had. I breathed in the darkness shadowed by a moon and I breathed with the two dogs. They didn’t know what to think of me. Tired of barking they growled, inched closer, grew bored, sniffed the grass, wizzed and kicked with their hind legs. Soon we were all three quiet and I was happy. I remained still, so as not to prod them. One scrape of a pebble and they were off again, underneath the moon, not howling at it but snarling at me from their stomachs. I was here once and I did all that, finally got that chance you were talking about; I breathed and I saw the breeze in the lonely this far south redwood tree, there anyway its time. I breathed and smelled a eucalyptus pungeance and a kind of desert spice, riding there, spinning on the air, waiting for me, dry because of the days, jasmine, too. I breathed and stretched tall for the moon.
Richardson Never Tamed
Tonight’s midnight ramble took me through the forest. Well, this is going to be a crunch-fest, I said. Frozen snow quiet frigid lovely stillness, but doesn’t hold your weight. Crunch-crunch-crunch! Every step, gently first then without a care - step into it. Big Dipper pee behind the cabin. Heard a voice - climb Richardson in the snow. Oh, man, I can’t not in the snow and ice and loud crunching somebody will call the cops someone will shoot first and ask questions later as will the mountain lion! But summitted Mt. Richardson in the ice and snow, wild winds beyond the trees, face turned to the southwest, where over the snow, sightly, air too crisp almost, I could smell Spring. Never tamed.
