Moon

I saw the moon you looked at too. I am glad you saw it. I am glad you told me you saw it. I was in my truck. I wanted to pull over, park and sit out in the field on its highest point and look. Just to look at the moon , an old friend.

Earlier that evening I had read W. B. Yeats’ poem , “Adam’s Curse”. His moon was an earlier moon – a dusk moon.

“And in the trembling blue-green of the sky
A moon, worn as if it had been a shell
Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell
About the stars and broke in days and years.

I had a thought for no one's but your ears:
That you were beautiful, and that I strove
To love you in the old high way of love;

That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown
As weary-hearted as that hollow moon.”

And I remembered Michael Herr’s moon in his book, Dispatches, concerning Vietnam.

“the moon came up nasty and full, a fat moist piece of decadent fruit.”

I thought of these two moons as I looked at my moon. My moon was hooked in the sky much later than W.B.’s, so it wasn’t “washed” out looking, it was a big splatch of yellow, but not the yellow of “decadent fruit” like Michael’s either. My moon was the moon of an exuberant child who had colored outside the lines with a massive yellow crayon. The yellow spilled over into the sky – greater than the image itself. Larger than life. Yet it was still a two dimensional moon. Why?

I never did pull over to sit and watch, but kept driving to the bar while watching the moon and having these thoughts rumble through my head.

The bar was kind of nice – the music 60’s rock & roll, I danced, but I am the type that ends up entertaining the old women and the fat girls. I guess being single and kind of faded I am prey to all sorts of desperate people. But it was distracting recreating the movements and rhythms of an earlier time.

I came home and wrote, “the moon looked like someone colored outside the lines”.

This morning you called and mentioned the moon. I wanted you to know I saw it too. And I have.

My Last Dance with Charlotte

I exercised the other day. I don't exercise much anymore. I am in my late fifties but the other evening in a motel in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, I got out of bed from watching television to set the alarm which was across the room. I shut off the television and turned on the radio to dial in the public radio station. The most beautiful music was on the air. "American Angels" was playing by "Anonymous Four".

I turned out the lights and began slowly stretching and extending my arms, stretching my shoulders and rolling my neck. It felt good to move. Soon I was remembering Charlotte, my ballet dance partner 39 years ago, from Alabama and I stood up a little straighter, tucked in my buttocks, sucked in my stomach, raised my shoulders and waited for her to come twirling into my arms. I danced to her memory the best I could. Slowly moving my stiff under-used muscles as smoothly and rhythmically as I was able to the sweet music filling the room. I lightly jumped leftward and rightward while delicately moving my ballet arms in a country boy's idea of Nureyev. Anyone watching would have seen an old paunch bellied toad of a man doing an arthritic dance in the darkened sour smelling room with matted carpet of a mundane motel with semi trucks in the parking lot.

Everything external was incongruous with the internal visions in the old man's head. His body was helping him remember the time he was youthful, vibrant, and strong, dancing with a beautiful cheery dark haired girl who smiled and laughed and was excited to have a dance partner. His hip bones and shoulder bones creaked and crackled, popped and snapped, but he kept moving and stretching his arms, legs, and back to the heavenly voices coming from the radio, in the dark, in the bright white room of his memory. The crowds were raucous, his partner's muscles taut, well trained and warm. Her movements fluid. They rolled and strolled the dance boards together, their bodies singing to the sky, the sunshine, and the sweet winds of joyous movement.

Charlotte died several years ago from an accidental gunshot wound.

Hide and Seek

"...7, 8, 9, 10, Here I come, ready or not!" And yet I hesitate to uncover my eyes, to remove my fingers from my face. In the soft warm darkness of counting I can see you standing before me smiling, your hands quietly folded behind you, you swaying a little - delightfully whispering, "Here I am, come get me."

If I open my eyes now and you are gone I will be alone. The bright day will glare off the trees and grasses. In the golden empty air there will be no coolness of you standing before me if I remove my soulful thinking fingers from my alone face.

I like having you near me, in my head, munching on memories of togetherness. My hands are bound to my face by silver threads of remembering - of having. The golden empty air must not pierce these dark irises of once having seen.

Holding shadows of your nearness I am afraid to become quite alone again.

Illness

I tried to read tonight, but the words came into my brain little squiggly figures with no voices. Mute arms and legs dangling, twisted and upraised. Somehow a switch is off or perhaps a fuse is blown. The circuitry stops behind my eyes. A mirror can read as I read. Tonight. Someone's dirty laundry is stuffed up my nose. Wrinkled socks and stained underwear. I tried to go to bed. It is misery. I could just as well sleep on the top of a post. My joints sing to me in the off key style of a tomcat. I feel like one of Picassos's cubist paintings tonight. My body parts have become disjointed, separated from the main, and lay scattered across the canvas of the mattress.

Every part beckons for attention. I must gather them up, bundle them together and rise. Watch television, take them for a walk outside. Come on follow me. The night is warm. The rubber plant died last week, but this night is warm. Look at the sky, see the stars, yes clouds too, and the leafless trees, see how the night sky rests on their branches. The body rebels. It is as futile as keeping children quiet on a bus. "Jimmy sit down, Ronnie don't pull Julie's, hair. A nose bleed? What happened Tommy? Connie don't swear, I don't care if Dennis farted. Dennis try to control yourself. Sit down! Quiet! Please!


Illness is not glamorous.

Someone

I found someone who would talk to me.
He is in a book and he is dead,
but he is more alive and more
important to me than anyone in town.

Three Stories

My daughter wrote three stories.
One about a bear and a balloon.
One about a cat with lots of ribbons.
One about a dog that could talk.

Quiet

My brain
is as quiet
as a strawberry.

Need

The broken heart I can live with;
the need to be hugged
is what gives me trouble.

Aphrodite

Words fell
out of her mouth
like apples:

Whole and round,
succulent and sweet.

Tending the Fire

Such drudgery, waking up at three in the morning, cold, half asleep, dark, stumbling down into the basement, cursing under your breath, trees, coal, dinosaurs, bark all over the floor, tubs of ashes, the clang bang of metal and the grinding and scraping, trying to stir the coals, arrange the logs, all for a patch of orange flame to keep the blood flowing, the eyeballs from freezing solid.

Everyone sleeping cozily and you are bent over in the basement peering into the bowels of an angry warrior, poking and prodding his intestines, agitating him, trying to keep the houseplants from dying and the baby from frostbite. The cat peering through the basement window wondering what all the fuss is about and why the light is on, while you are thinking, "Maybe next year we will move to Florida". But knowing you never will, because this kind of life has been in your blood for generations and to move away to a more temporate climate would be to tread on your dead ancestors.

You can't go because every misery you feel now, the cold, the tiredness, the strain on your back as you bend stirring the coals, are the voices of your ancestors. They are all around you, remembering for you and your children. You can feel them in the strain of lifting the coal, you can hear them in the murmuring of your thoughts and you can see them in the activity of your hands and arms: as your elbow bends, so bends the elbow of your grandfathers and grandmothers, your great grandfathers and greatgrandmothers and all the more ancient ones from both sides of your family and their families. Their blood is your blood. The room is crowded with everyone helping you.....and when you finally mount the stairs back into the world of the living you are satisfied and whole again. Life is good as you crawl into bed, pull the covers up high and snuggle next to your wife into the warmth she has kept for you while you were gone communing with the ancient earth and your prehistoric family.

Home

Vietnam - changed my
point of reference dramatically.

Home was never to return -
or so I thought.

The earth became my
home - and all its people
my kin. It took me a
long time to realize -
I never left home -

I came home.
It is a maturing process.

Forgot

I forgot a thousand
things today.

But everytime I
think about you

I relearn them -

I Am Pretending Now

I am pretending now:
I am an authentic person
and I have thoughts that are
valid, so let me speak.

I Have Nothing to Write About

I have nothing to write about. I missed you all day. You were gone. I had no way to reach you. All day I wanted to smoke. Misery and stress talked to me about cigarettes. I did not smoke.

I saw a bug on the floor at work this morning when I opened the restaurant in a pool of water dead and upside down a cicada. I walked around him as I did my chores defrosting fish and shrimp and heating gumbo. When the coffee was done I picked him up and placed him on a towel to drain.

I read the comics and the horoscopes, then the rest of the paper. Later I picked him up to see what he looked like. He was too complicated to describe green and black with stripes and two white smudges on his wide belly? throat? And his two eyes looked like they were stuck on as an after thought carelessly far apart, and his mouth or nose looked exactly like the shell coverings of a ladybug's wing without the spots or the separations, and his little legs were folded like debit brackets and other than his wings he looked very earthy. I threw him in the waste basket - he was too complicated. Maybe when I find another one I can be more exact and considerate.

I couldn't read anything tonight. I wanted to give up - I wanted to get a better color TV and subscribe to cable, and to buy an old refrigerator for my beer, and to get one of them skinny Texas girls in tight jeans and lots of makeup so I could relax and swear and not think anymore. I am too young to sit alone and watch dustballs fight silent battles along the edges of the faded carpet.

The Painted Wall

The paint on the wall,
it's like it became tired
and started to fade. In
patches, it faded. I guess
it lost control. I tried
to talk to it and
get it's spirit back up -
but I couldn't. The wall
was real splotchy.

It made me sad.

Music

There is no music today,
the ball that bounces
from word to word
is on vacation.

Without the bobbing white dot
I cannot follow the leader.
I am like a closed book today.
The scratchings of the pen
are entombed between closed covers.

I am entombed within myself -
silent, unmoving, perhaps
decaying.

There is no growth in a closed book.
No growth without the bouncing ball.

With no music, there is no life.

1972

One evening in Europe I was sitting on an upturned bucket in the basement of a rental house in Tubingen, Germany. My friends had left the house and I was alone. I walked down the stairs to the dark and strange basement, saw a bucket against a wall picked it up and carried it to the middle of the floor. I placed it upside down and sat on it. I felt afraid. I wrapped my arms around myself and began rocking forward and back quietly sobbing. I was in love with travel, intoxicated by the new isolation and diminishment of my normal identity. The basement was like a womb of rebirth for me. I was letting go of my childhood mythic self as I sat rocking and crying in the dark dank basement. Sobbing and rocking with my arms cradled around me in an upright semi-fetal position wondering what was happening. How could I be joyous and afraid at the same time? Three years before I had been in Vietnam, now I was in the middle of Germany, where another war thirty years earlier had been fought. I was a boy shedding my boyhood skin of play and imagination. I was alone in someone's basement afraid and happy.

There Are Cracks

I want to peel my skin off
in sheets and read the instructions
on the undersides.

to detach my muscles and make
sure they are not installed
upside down or wrong side out.

to be sure my bones are connected
tab A into slot A.

But I cannot dismantle myself
I cannot rebuild.

I can only live, walk, talk
but there are cracks &
certain parts fit loosely, if at all.

And light shines through from
another world. A world much distant
but greater than this.

One Dime

One dime & a penny in the urinal -

The sparkling torch of Liberty -
glistening through the yellow urine
tainted water.

She Said

She said, "It is wonderful that people attribute great things to you. If you attract other people's dreams like that and they make up fantasies about you, then you have a power over them. A power to pull them forward into their dreams and to give joy. You are a blessed child. Don't deny or run away from it. Grasp it and soar with it. You are one of the lucky ones."