yOunger than some

When I was young, I thought the purpose was
to learn how to walk making no sound,
leaving no footprints, no marks ever
you were there

I thought the purpose was,
to be the best player in the game
you had to hide so good you'd never
be found, no matter how hard anyone
looked, or called — they lied,
they cheated, they wanted to win
the easy way; I knew how to win
so good no one wanted to play.
One time I tied a friend up so
ingeniously he almost died
rather than escape. I loved
throwing my all into something
where if you lost, you tried again;
but if you won, you never needed to
doubt.

I never understood
why there was cheating.
If you didn't like the rules,
just don't play.
And trying to win
took all the fun
away.
I liked playing;
not trying.

Games
I never played: you name it.
Games
seemed to be for
when you were bored, too lazy
to play without rules.
If I had to play, I resisted
playing to win.
I liked being surprised I
won.

"You did it on purpose!"


"What is the purpose ...?"


therefore, On Purpose ...


Arriving late to school
getting tardy slips every rainy day
taking so long to walk to school
saving worms
soft question marks on the sidewalks.

at 4
Burying a cigarette
as a gift to God
graves were where
people went to be
with God
after all, kites
got messages sent
up strings
a cigarette
after all, grownups seemed
to really like them,
sighing, lips pursed
smoke a thin dance of air

at 3
Remembering my first strange word:
vacuum
walking by a neighbor's house,
hearing the wailing whine —
the comfort of finally
having a definition. We
didn't have one.

at 9
getting an award
for helping compose
what became our school song,
the line "raincloud purple."

then a few years later,
earnest but memory failing already
helping a teacher write the words
down to a favorite song
and learning too late
that I'd made almost all
of them up.

first paid job
writing: a fiction serial
for our elementary school
mimeo newspaper, my own
words shaped by that
exquisite sharp smell.

at 4
creating The Bug Club
for all my friends
2- and 6-legged.
Even some 8.
And one-
footed snails.

Raising butterflies, cocoon stunned
crumpled beauty emerging
the breathless reward of flight,
cricket frogs from tadpoles
singing in my bedroom, hopping
up hallways to startle my parents
stumbling to bed,
my awakening to shouts

sitting out rainstorms
under the boughs of eucalyptus
forest menthol fragrant,
sometimes finding nest
eggs of feral chickens,
always abandoned, a
deserted still life

at 13
creating a detective agency
to justify my curiosity
validate my finding out

riding my bike to churches,
synagogues, cathedral
people staring, an interloper
eavesdropping but really
listening for someone talking
to God

at 8
loving to read aphorisms
the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld
realizing they, finally, could teach
how to live, the answers
contained within their wit
the first stirrings
of wisdom


realizing that the only people
I could talk to
were dead, alive only
in books


talking with bullies
talking them out of fights
with me, distracting them,
yes, but finding myself
loving the answers they gave
and the fragile friendship
that rarely lasted
the egging on of their
friends

Living afraid days
the raised voice, raised
hand, belt. Keeping record
but never knowing a day
without punishment, harsh
words. More trouble than
I was worth, for sure,
more than my parents
could understand, but
always forstalling
trouble became my motto

I never "got it"
Refusing to do homework
repetitive drudgery
of what you already knew
last thing on my mind
teach me something new
but don't waste my time

But yet the pain
the pain
the inevitable "teaching"
punishment
of being twisted to fit
the holes, crammed
and confused as everyone else
when the pain didn't work,
when I still didn't care
about work that didn't matter
to me. I only wanted
to learn ...

One of the things I never got
was how punishment taught,
one thing I never learned.
One line I never bought.
****

sAyings

Snow is just nature's way of allowing you, too, to walk on water.

*
We do not give birth to children; they give us our own birth.

*
We have a lot to forgive and a lot to imagine yet.
We don't need arts teachers; we need arts preachers.
Teach us what to do with our minds besides thinking.
Teach us that we are not our thinking.
Show us how to listen to what has no voice.
Teach us to witness, then teach us to celebrate.

*
Make your life a testament to beauty.

*

There was no Big Bang
there was a Great Shout
and the word was
the world was
what the world is
in that moment, is
in this moment
unfurled
what in the word is
begging
for grace
peace
namaste

*****

"Gods come and go, but prayer is forever."
— Yehuda Amichai


What can we offer to god, who has everything, knows everything?
What can we offer that is not superfluous, uninspired, is not
a lie?
"We offer the sighs of the heart."
— St. Gregory


3 poems by Yehuda Amichai

I know a man
who photographed the view he saw
from the window of the room where he made love
and not the face of the woman he loved there.
*


The sea and the shore are always next to each other.
Both want to learn to speak, to learn to say
one word only. The sea wants to say "shore"
and the shore "sea." They draw closer,
millions of years, to speech, to saying
that single word. When the sea says "shore"
and the shore "sea,"
redemption will come to the world,
the world will return to chaos.
*


Here in this wadi we lived during the war.
Many years have passed since then, many victories
and many defeats. I have gathered many consolations in my life
and squandered them, many sorrows
that I spilled in vain. I've said many things, like the waves
of the sea at Ashkelon in the West
that always keep saying the same thing.
But as long as I live, my soul remembers
and my body slowly ripens in the fires of its life story.

The evening sky lowers like a bugle call over us,
and our lips move like the lips of men in prayer
before there was a god in the world.

Here we would lie by day, and at night
we would go to battle.
The smell of the sand is as it was, and the smell
of the eucalyptus leaves
and the smell of the wind.

And I do now what any memory dog does:
I howl quietly
and piss a boundary of remembrance around me
so no one else can enter.

— Yehuda Amichai

pReaching to the Choir

Hello?
Don't get distracted; don't be misled.
You'll miss the point.
They want you divided, fighting
straw dogs they set at you.

What are you protesting...?

It is not by your patriotism that you support imperialism.
Nor is it by your pledge of allegiance that you keep flags covering truth.
And it is not by your vote or your note to the editor.
No need to buy your vote.
They have bought your life
with the hamburger and fries
you just ate,
the SUV and one-car-per-person lifestyle.
Who the heck taught you
you could "own" a home?

It's not just sweatshops cranking out Nikes
overseas. Check our own backyards.

This time the monster *is* under your bed.

They've bought your life and obedience
with the produce pickers, the maids, and dishwashers —
the parts you ignore,
the nuts and bolts (tape & glue)
holding our economy together.
They know you won't complain unless
it falls on top of you.
But by then, you'll think it's
your fate.



Poetry is not
a job —
but poetry is about
making a living.

It is your foundation
not your soapbox —
make it your sandbox.
Play at the edges of what
isn’t soft, what doesn’t run
away, and what drums
warn you about.


Reading poetry is like entering another world — a wilderness of image, sound, and symbol. But it is someone else’s landscape. Poems are powerful intimacy. Perhaps that is why “love poetry” works so well.

This new landscape is so personal, sometimes you need time to adjust, to take your shoes off, to get your feet wet, to feel the dirt and grasses between your toes, to know where to step and what to skip. When to jump and skip.

Poems are pure ice crystals. They melt slowly in the fire of your focused attention, quenching an unsuspected thirst.

But if you haven’t got that kind of time, then a guide is helpful — someone who knows the way in … and knows the way out for you.

The guide is not you. The guide can’t do the work for you. The guide can only point at things, or point at you. But the guide is not you and the guide does not take you — you walk on your own. Walk at your own angle, speed, walk don’t run, run as fast as you can.


We think it is the poem, the painting, we create …. But it is us, the art is our self. Art works to discover, to uncover the layers experience encrusts us with. To filter/find what is us, underneath what has been learned.

****

thE Laguna Lacuna

The song begun by the flute rose overhead, became part of the air, and then part of someone else's breath.
The mountains never looked so warm, resting in the sun all stretched and eloquent. A slight breeze riffled the leaves of the pines and oak, creating harmonies high and low. Shadows and light played across the meadow, dipping into the small lakes, and soon everything was beholden to one or the other. Three hawks circled on thermals, two of them a mated pair and resenting the third until it sailed away. The day seemed to linger, a longing glance at summer, and the late-season flowers fairly danced beneath butterflies. A woodpecker hammered intermittently, a lone loud sound bookshelved by silence.

****

In the thick of it …

Some like to teach so that someone will be taught.

Some like to teach so that someone will know who the teacher is.

Some like to teach so no one knows they are learning.



Some like to dance as if everyone was watching.

Some like to dance as if no one is watching.

Some like to dance and let no one watch.



Some like to sing for everyone to hear.

Some like to sing to let everyone join in.

Some like to sing when no one is listening.



Some like to create mysteries to confound those who don't like them.

Some like to create mysteries to intrigue those who like to solve them.

Some like to create mysteries so mysterious no one knows they're there.

****

iN my working life...

What is the poet to do when he sees every day the ones who come back from war, missing parts of themselves, seen and unseen. What is the poet to do when every day he sees what is called a "burden" by those who do not carry, a "duty" by those who only command... Who sends another to fight in a situation that only angers another?

Who knows how to replace illusions with dreams in the young?

At the Navy/Marine hospital, some days can seem pretty rough …

At a speech given at the University of Concepción in southern Chile in 1968, poet Pablo Neruda said:

“Perhaps the duties of the poet have been the same throughout history. Poetry was honored to go out into the streets, to take part in combat after combat. When they called him 'rebel', the poet was not daunted. Poetry is rebellion. The poet is not offended if he is called subversive. Life is more important than societal structures, and there are new regulations for the soul. Seeds spring up everywhere. All ideals are exotic. Every day we await momentous changes — we are experiencing the excitement of a mutation in the human order: spring incites rebellion.
"We poets hate hatred and make war on war.

"Only a few weeks ago, in the heart of New York, I began my reading with some verses of Walt Whitman. Only that morning, I had bought still another copy of his Leaves of Grass. When I opened it in my hotel room on Fifth Avenue the first thing I read were these lines, which I had never particularly noticed before:

Away with themes of war! away with war itself!
Hence from my shuddering sight to never more return that show of blacken’d, mutilated
corpses!
That hell unpent and raid of blood, fit for wild tigers or for lop-tongued wolves, not
reasoning men.

"(When I read those lines that night) These lines brought an instantaneous response. The public that overflowed the auditorium stood and applauded wildly. Unknowingly, through the words of the bard Walt Whitman, I had touched the anguished heart of the North American people. The destruction of defenseless hamlets, napalm burning entire villages of Vietnamese — all this, through the words of a poet who lived a hundred years ago, condemning injustice with his poetry — was palpable and visible to those who were listening.
"Would that my poems were so lasting — the poetry already written, and the poetry still to come.”

[translated by Margaret Sayers Peden]

fOrtune's fall

This time of year
I like to read
people's fortunes
from the leaves
in their front yards.

****

"I have the world's largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of he world. Perhaps you've seen it." — Steven Wright

****

Spite the Mote

I believe all WMDs — especially TVs — should be destroyed.


****

(apologies to Pablo N)

Total woman, sexual apple, hot moon,
thick aroma of seaweed, crushed mud and light,
what dark clarity do I see opening between your columns?

What old night thoughts a man touches with his senses.

Ay, to love is a voyage with water and stars,
submerged air, and abrupt sandstorms —
to love is a lightning combat:
two bodies by a single sweet honey defeated.

Kiss to kiss, I cross your small infinities
to your visible self, yes, your rivers,
your tiny towns and deltas,
and the genital fire transformed into delight
runs by the thin ways of the blood,
until hurrying like a nocturnal flower,
until being and not ever to be,
a sunray in the shade.

Terms of Endurance

In the news, have heard recently & quite frequently the use of the German word "Schadenfreude" (perverse pleasure taken in another's plight or misfortune). It has gained an ironic (yes, that's our culture for you, ever since Seinfeld & audience infamously mistook cynicism for a fashionable form of "irony") prevalence, what with tsunamis, hurricanes, and earthquake news coverage.

Schadenfreude, a word which I think adequately reflects upon the traffic phenomenon of rubbernecking. Or for that matter, for what passes as "news," as covered by corporate media. A perfect word, we have to borrow it, co-opt its hapless sound into our own lapses. But so appropriate.

Are there other concepts which don't have a precise word in English?

English language has a powerful ability to absorb and utilize other cultures' words. A good or bad thing, depending on one's point of view. Just as our quite maleable culture absorbs, transmutes, and appropriates every other culture it comes into contact with. So we have a word for almost everything we value. Especially in science and technology, worldwide, English terms are predominant.

No wonder this language currently dominates the world. English-language schools know it's often a necessary tool for success. But I don't think it's just because of its alignment with economics or capitalism, or pop culture, let alone military might. Although it's being predicted that English may not be the lingua franca of the next 50 years, I still don't see the pretenders to the throne — Mandarin Chinese or Arabic — doing that; they've historically been too self-referential, insular of influence.

But about those words and our customs about words?

… You know the common but false story that there are vast numbers of Inuit words for snow? It has been reported recently that climate change in the Arctic means that snow and ice conditions are occurring for which the native population has no words, since they've never seen them before.

Evidently there are 27 Albanian words for "moustache" and another 27 for "eyebrows."

Some interesting words and meanings:

… Persian "nakhur," which means "a camel that won't give milk until her nostrils have been tickled."

… Indonesian didis — "to search and pick up lice from one's own hair, usually when in bed at night."

… Cook Islands Maori: papakata, meaning "to have one leg shorter than the other."

… Japanese: bakkushan, for "a girl who looks as though she might be pretty when seen from behind, but isn't from the front."

… Tingo, from the Pascuense language of Easter Island, meaning "to borrow objects from a friend's house, one by one, until there's nothing left."

… Hawaii: ho'oponopono — "solving a problem by talking it out"

… Japanese: kyoikumama — "a mother who pushes her children into academic achievement"

… Indonesia: kekaku — "to awaken from a nightmare"

… Mayan: Bol — "stupid in-laws"

… German: Torschlüsspanik — "the frantic anxiety experienced by unmarried women as they race against the 'biological clock'";

Treppenwitz — the "clever remark that comes to mind when it is too late to utter it" (similar, I think, in meaning to the French "Esprit de I'escalier" — a witty remark that occurs to you, literally, on the way down the stairs);

Schlimmbesserung — "a so-called improvement that makes things worse";

Drachenfutter — "a peace offering from guilty husbands for wives," or literally "dragon fodder" (perhaps not an image most wives would be happy to be associated with);

… Russian: Razbliuto — the feeling (not quite of love, but perhaps close) a person has for someone once loved but now longer the object of affection

… Attaccabottoni — someone who grabs the conversation and won't let you go

… Korinthenkacker (literally "raisin crapper") — someone who obsesses on insignificant details

Arabic: Taarradhin — Arabic has no word for "compromise" in the sense of reaching an arrangement via struggle and disagreement. However a much happier concept, taarradhin, exists in Arabic. It implies a happy solution for everyone, an "I win, you win." It's a way of resolving a problem without anyone losing face.

… New Guinea is actually home to a fifth of the world's languages. From the highlands: Buritilulo — "the practice of comparing yams to settle a dispute."

… From the Kilivila language, spoken on Kiriwina, the largest of the Trobriand Islands, part of Papua New Guinea: Mokita — "the truth everybody knows but nobody speaks" (such as, for instance, the idea that most Americans seem to be against immigration, or that IQ measures only academic performance: facts well known to the scientific community, but perhaps best not discussed in public).

****

If you're interested in a great book about language and its effect on people, cultures and history, I highly recommend "Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World" by Nicholas Ostler. Fascinating, about which a starred, informative review in Booklist says:

"… readers learn how languages ancient and modern (Sumerian and Egyptian; Spanish and English) spread and how they dwindle. The raw force of armies counts, of course, in determining language fortunes but for far less than the historically naive might suppose: military might failed to translate into lasting linguistic conquest for the Mongols, Turks, or Russians. Surprisingly, trade likewise proves weak in spreading a language — as the Phoenician and Dutch experiences both show. In contrast, immigration and fertility powerfully affect the fate of languages, as illustrated by the parallel histories of Egyptian and Chinese. Ostler explores the ways modern technologies of travel and communication shape language fortunes, but he also highlights the power of ancient faiths — Christian and Moslem, Buddhist and Hindu — to anchor language traditions against rapid change. Of particular interest [to readers] will be Ostler's provocative conjectures about a future in which Mandarin or Arabic take the lead or in which English fractures into several tongues. Few books bring more intellectual excitement to the study of language."

The Dead Can Still Dance

They appeared last night.
A sighting … The apparition's appointed rounds: Humphrey's By the Bay.

Lisa
Sings like someone alien, a voice from another world, too beautiful to be “only” human. As if what she knew wouldn’t fit into any earthy language.

Singing from the foundations of all we in our hundreds of civilizations have ever known.

A voice of primal beauty, stripped of artifice down to the bedrock art itself. Raw, so dark as to come full circle toward light itself. Other times, angelic and spacious as the air it re-creates in its own honor: a breeze newly christened sweeps out over the night bay water. Seagulls remark their surprise, a Greek chorus.

Her voice is proto-human … a lone voice singing out to the universe as if it cared, cared enough to listen, and could even understand what it is to be human, to be foundered on this earth for these last few hundreds of thousands of years, and so desperately hoping to be around for just a little while longer …

Lisa sings. What she does honors the age-old art.

A voice that can only sing in prayer — the only language worth breath, after all — the only language of love — true, unconditional love.

"In concert, Dead Can Dance was almost a religious experience," wrote Amazon.com's always respectable reviewer John Dilberto. He wrote of their box set:

"1981-1998 reveals why Dead Can Dance was such an influential group and why their music remains very much alive. From the opening notes of "Frontier," the first piece Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry improvised together, Dead Can Dance opened a doorway into worlds at once ancient and alien, frightening and glorious …. Through their many stylistic shifts, it reveals the music of ecstasy, a state of spiritual release that can be as serene as a Gregorian chant and as intense as a Persian dervish.

"But then, Dead Can Dance always had two sides. There were Perry's Jim Morrison-meets-Sinatra vocal croons, and there was the uncanny and passionate Gerrard, whose Middle Eastern, Bulgarian, and Gregorian singing styles created a transcultural dialect of the imagination. Perry surrounds Gerrard in a gothic architecture of synthesizers, strings, the Chinese hammered dulcimer called the yang ch'in (played by Gerrard), bouzoukis, and hurdy-gurdys. As ancient as its sources, Dead Can Dance is as modern as the end of time, which is where a lot of this music still sounds like it's headed …."

Link

The universe is dead; the party’s over.

The stars are dead; the few left we know are embers. A dark sky full of all-but-burnt-out sparks…

We stare as if from the back window of a car speeding away — our late-model Galaxy — it reaches a vanishing point, the red shift blinding us in a blink, a Bang.

Those stars, those sparks …

All that’s left from the cosmic bonfire that burned so brightly once, the Party of the Universe, billions of years before we even arrived — the Big Bang, we call it now.

To us it seems like an instantaneous Bang, but it lasted longer than eons to those who know time better than our tardy selves. We party crashers are too late. All that was is gone.

We throw a party in our own honor.

We poke among the ruins with our rockets. The absences deafening.

We live in the dying glow, bask in the pale light that dims even as we speak.

In this last exhale, life as we know it, a fading echo. All creatures departing from this farthest shore.

***

Shadow fancies

Another day of unbroken reality. Each moment coagulating from the wound of morning, I woke in the dark to see the sun. It never disappoints. Unmistakable dawn. It doesn’t matter that today in its fresh promise it appears to be an orange with sections missing, simmering. I inhale a daily brew.

But before I knew you, there were such things that attached themselves to me like shadows, leaning lean across my thoughts. Nothing that I couldn’t handle with gloves, as long as I didn’t watch what I was doing. To touch life at all is to be burned, purely, not even smoke but a bright lighting of our intentions.

***

Gleanings

“It’s our knowledge of death that makes us pray. Every path a child takes looks precarious to the parent’s eye. And it is, and 'precarious' is an old word that means ‘full of prayers.’” – Michael Meade

“If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.” – Pablo Neruda

“Many surrealists were attracted to Mexico because of its mix of ancient culture, volcanic landscapes, and absurdist humor. French surrealist writer André Breton declared Mexico the “surrealist country par excellence.” – Wall Street Journal

***