What is it like to make music? It is skipping on sunlight opening your heart to something strange unexpected something sublimely beautiful in those sublimely beautiful times.
Sometimes it's a bust. Sometimes a thousand degrees of sweetness.
But when the music plays through you when you are not much more than a spectator to sounds emanating mysteriously from your lips your lungs your fingers
It's crazy good then.
There truly are no words to express the miracle of music in the moment the player listening as raptly as the audience
It all comes together at the end and that's the lesson jazz has taught me.
It will all come together at the end in glory or in sorrow or both.
We speak the true tongue a language formed in the deepest trenches of the earth's oceans those places where life was formed where the elemental heat of the planet expresses itself in steam, confusion and eruption
We sing in the true tongue music that is blind yet sees all its rhyme set to rhythm a motion of flesh-hung bones
We stand against every fate yet our song will endure it will be the last song
And we paint with a palette stolen from the sky on the day of the most perfect dawn
We are God's thieves stealing a line here and there dipping a sad bucket into a river of stars holding it proudly aloft the heart shaped into a song perhaps a poem nothing more
When the heart stirs the feet soon follow or so it is with me born to be a dancer
Lithe and compact fearless in motion a Baryshnikov of the living room a Nureyev in the night
When my daughter was new born seventeen sweet years ago I would hold her close dance her through the whole house sing to her tell her I'll love you forever and ever no matter what promise her everything it was in my power to give
Here in my dotage my dancing embarrasses her my rude manners outrage her at times No matter
I thrill when I hear her sing weep when I see her onstage grin like God's fool when I meet her at the backstage door.
This tribute and these poor lines are humbly offered by a man who is blessed a man who wakes up every day saying thanks a father proud a retired musician (more or less) whose child without urging took up the mantle and carried it further than dad ever could.
O sister when did you become the perfect treatise on love and the sacred painted face?
When did your words divide the day from my night?
It was ninety yesterdays ago when first your verse startled my eyes speaking a language native to this ground speaking with grace with love and with a defined determination sweetened by the red clays of your home
The soul of the prairie holds you in its embrace the long vista the tornado the tempest all compete for your attention
And here I stand at the back of the line humble one hand in my pocket one holding an urgent postcard
There we were at the beginning of the world A forest redwood bay laurel A watercourse chiseled into the limestone of that ridge opening outward to the west and setting sun
We were almost under water through miles, through layers of green
We sat together listening as the alto recorder in my hand played on its own!
A tune that called a mahogany-voiced bird to harmonize A tune that gentled the sun into the sea. A tune that wove together every instant of the days we had yet to live
There is peace at the end but no joy the abyss is only silence
and a taut string connecting us to eternity.
Forgive me for this hello poetry two-fer. But I just posted a poem re Mahler's ninth symphony and realized the last two stanzas were a poem on their own. So here they are - orphans for your separate attention.
It is all flowing uphill back into the tributaries into the headwaters
Life returns to its source at the end Chinook salmon spawn in their natal streams and die their bodies nourish their young who make haste to salt water then return from the sea to repay the favor
Uphill it is for us a long slog, it seems
We are dedicated enemies of entropy unconscious yet knowing our duty
So these are your instructions.
You must wake each day and know it as a gift never pause in worship never cease your upstream struggles until it is time for such foolishness to end.
Grit and muscle heart and will life is short yet sweeter still.
Burned two cities in Japan. It was not antiseptic. It was not friendly.
It was ****** on a scale that the world has come to know too well but by a means that upset the balance of nature
The magnetic forces of the atom unhinged set off on lunatic paths to arrive at something like the sun
Flesh was peeled from bone that day faces peeled from skulls
This is not a pretty thing not a bedtime story for your kids
Yet our taxes pave a path to the next generation of hell-found missiles aimed deliberately and directly at the hopes the domestic fears the quiet anxieties the moments of wonder of love the kiss in the morning goodbye the welcome home in the evening of every person alive today.
Mother Ceres hair trussed and braided like an artichoke, smiles down on this mad scene.
Bums asleep on every littered lawn, cripples, drunks, businessmen, young women move by in the shattered light, pacing to some cynical drum, proceeding from place to place.
Armageddon looms with the stink of diesel and a sudden roar.
Slow motion bodies crawl, skip and hop.
The light grows white and whiter yet. The ***** bus window cracks and outside all is very still.
A head fashioned from cold stone, blank eyes seeing all. A smile matching Death to his lithe sister Love. A smile.
Demeter! Ceres! Mother of summer, the dry wind.
Love the hollow stone, the dust, the poisoned air. Love this poor harvest.
In my home there is a reading nook. A small space with windows facing two sides - to the south and west. South for the sun. West for the setting of the sun.
That's where I live. It's where I read. It's where I write.
That's where I spend my wasted days.
A blessed space and a waste.
So here am I, O Lord! Your imperfect servant and you know me well!
I might live a good many years yet with and (mostly) without your guidance. So be it.
I'm kind of an old bird, I guess. Might drop off at any moment. So be it.
It's hard to wrap your mind around eternity, grasp the cold stone of death. I guess things were designed that way.
So best to keep moving and tell the tale in beauty and bounty while traveling this golden road.
A woman whose face was found On a fresco in the tomb of King Philip of Macedon, father to Alexander - She passed me in the street today, alive and breathing roses.
She is the living memory of someone who lived and breathed, as the night is long, in the mountains of northern Greece A Long Time Ago.
She dresses in clothes that don't fit. She has cut her hair and crosses the street with grace. She can see the comings and goings of people and also the passing of clouds from her window. Her face, open and almost awkward, was discovered on a large fresco in the tomb of King Philip of Macedon.
My wife won't stop writing poetry it pours forth rich in imagery nuanced in tone brilliant inspired every line loved into existence tucked gently into bed each night and called into service the next morning.
Whereas my words are meager meek brittle and contrived words that push a barrel of horseshit toward the setting sun No hope of ever getting there.
Why do I try? It's really a bit sad numero dos is my destiny in this poetic liaison I am forever the dunce in poetry school.
But my teacher is a babe a truly hot number so I'll continue to sit at the back of the class try to follow the lessons and hope against hope she says a kind word.
The melodious thunk of Thelonious Monk. Nobody ever played the piano that way before or since nobody ever imagined music that way before or since.
It took a while for the audience to get it. Longer for the critics.
And the Poor Man - all he wanted was a hit record.
His wayward mind took him in difficult directions. Left him with flint on his tongue a fever on his brain. No matter to the music, though.
So take it any way you like - straight, no chaser. Or after midnight. Doesn't matter the time and place the drinks they're serving.
Not in this smoky little club practically sitting with the band. Know what I mean? Music like this might once have been heard on a planet spinning in some wild ellipse around Alpha Centauri. But never here. Never now.
So sit back and enjoy! That's what I'm doing - swinging slowly. Join me, friends.
Book your flight to my home town. Bring your seven-cornered syncopation hat, your saxophone or any other musical instruments you possess. You can sleep in a tent beneath the fir trees in my backyard once the guest room is full.
And together we can search for the mystic connections between interstellar music poetry truth and love.
It was a yellow Corvair convertible Ralph Nader's bogey our ***-fueled chariot our escape into the night sky.
We were strewn across a grassy ***** as if fallen from above stars thick in the sky still visible in those days Page Mill Road south of the City.
And all of the vanities and honesties of brilliant youth slouched about our shoulders lit our speech moved our ***** in the direction our fates intended.
It was freedom. It was escape. It was a foreshadowing of much trouble pre-dawn knocks on the door handcuffs and the tearful call home.
And a life leavened by sadness, a constant sense of doom,
but a foreshadowing as well of miracles dressed in second-hand clothes, but miracles just the same.
I'm an assassin a man of ****** I will **** your memories and place them in the dustbin of time
Sweetness comes with sleep memory is illusion ****** a thing of gripping hands and gasping breath the only thing real is my hand holding this pen a dog's tongue on my face
Summer has settled sweetly here we enjoy the hours take pleasure in the taverns and circuses of this life
Our merriment obscures the steady progress of time the creeping insecurity of old age
But I say let merriment prevail!
In the face of all these bogus truths I choose only truth a steely resolve and what might yet prove to be a vain hope in eternity
Time tells its tale and time will tell
I have no idea where this came from. I was talking to my daughter and the first stanza came out of our discussion. Who is this assassin? No idea. My daughter is very tolerant of her dad.
An unnatural light framed your face your eyes in shadow as always the brilliant sun of June cried in the heavens the trees moving with the rumors of what might be
Everything there was to say about the rest of my life was eloquently stated laid down exclamation pointed
Tell me what's going on in your life, my friend. Did you tickle the belly of the moon last night? Lie down in the lair of spiders? Or did a sweet wind take your mind, transform it into ripples across the pond radiating outward? Or perchance electricity and the sweet scent of ozone? Or a tiny flower called "Nevermore"?
Me I chose to dig a cave beneath my anxieties taste something resembling Life, in congested dreams,
All for a moment of quiet and the hint of a new poem.
I've been writing poetry on my Iphone - bad idea, perhaps. Somehow deleted this poem and had to reconstruct it from memory and some notes.
We failed the summit that year Diamond Peak summer of 1974
There on a razor's edge ridge sheer drop to the east thousands of feet certain death on that side no safe path forward
And the way we had come an arduous boulder-strewn ***** Angle of Repose.
As we pondered our next move, I told my friend a story that had just come into my thoughts.
A young man, as we were, promised his friends he would fly.
To their horror he stretched his arms toward the sun and leaped into the chasm.
Most saw a young man in the long arc of his demise falling to earth.
But one sharp-eyed friend saw a fierce bird of prey come rising with the winds and land there on that ridge where we sat and from which he fell.
The story was a presence there between us. We sat together lost in its meaning. And then it happened.
A bird of prey, entirely white, unknown to us, perhaps unknown to Science, came rising with the winds from below from where that boy in the story had fallen. It landed on the outcrop from which he (in the story) had jumped. This magnificent creature turned its impenetrable gaze to us and screamed.
The instant the bird alighted and flew down the mountainside we leapt to our feet to follow.
What came next took place in myth.
In that myth, we were heroes able to run at full speed - some would call it a breakneck pace - down that long mountain ***** Boulder-strewn.
Without fear Without hesitation in full stride one boulder to the next.
Boulders the size of cottages Some the size of a grey whale mysteriously beached on a mountain.
Flying more than running.
With the falcon as a guide we wandered the afternoon through trackless wilderness.
A timeless afternoon in the Garden. And then humbly back to camp.
You might not believe this story. But it is a story as true as myth and every bit as real.
I came to you like a blinded man a supplicant on the road to ruin Someone who had once owned hope but sewed it up in a sack and gave it to a beggar on the street
I came to you like a condemned man inches from the noose holding hands with a phantom a shadow masquerading as wisdom or death
Finally I came to you in desperation the desperation of those whose parents have disowned them of those with a terminal disease called life a street corner clown miming his passions one false tear tattooed on his cheek
And you humored me Held me at arm's length while you wove a spider's web shield to wrap up your heart defend it never truly surrender it
Yet you dear heart are my one
I never thought it would be like this never imagined that a bloviated moon would sleep between us. That a crows' chorus would be our wedding march. Yet here we are. Dare I say it? At peace.
People passing like smoke their reflections in the glass their ruddy faces locked away in small intricately carved wooden boxes that make a sweet music when opened.
Their bodies, which will decay and become clean dust, these also a sweet music make.
Watching Listening I breathe the bones, lungs, and thoughts of my ancestors moving with this wind.
Whether carried and strewn like October's leaves or as if the wind itself is the breath that these ghosts leave in their passing. The science texts do not say. The stars, hard and distant, offer no help.
Luck is my legend it leads me down the pathways of fate it plays havoc with my prospects and cements a place in time for every breath of wind that might shorten my breath.
Dear Hello Poetry You like my poems! This is weird. What do I have to show for all those years scribbling on a tiny notepad? In my pocket: $1.53, an old shopping list featuring cat food and half-and-half, also the IPhone I'm using to compose this missive, some lint.
Dear Hello Poetry you made me start writing poetry again.
I thought I was done with all that. It's too hard takes up too much of my time. Every second I spend arm-wrestling a poem is a second I could be using to eat peanut butter on toast or walk the dog.
Dear Hello Poetry - because of you somebody with an improbable hat called me a poet.
Don't tell my mother.
And Hello Poetry - because of you I cannot buy a hat.
But I'll get over all of that. I forgive you, Hello Poetry.
But please don't tell my mother.
The only hope I have for this poem is that some people will laugh when they read it.
You said that October In the tall dry grass by the orchard When you chose to be free, "Again someday, maybe ten years."
After college I saw you One time. You were strange, And I was obsessed with a plan.
Now ten years and more have Gone by; I've always known where you were - I might have gone back to you Hoping to win your love back.
You still are single.
I didn't I thought I must make it alone. I have done that.
Only in dream, like this dawn, Does the grave, awed intensity Of our young love Return to my mind, to my flesh.
We had what the others All crave and seek for. We left it at nineteen.
I feel ancient, as though I had Lived many lives.
And may never now know If am a fool Or have done what my karma demands.
Gary Snyder was a major influence for me back in the 70s. This poem of his was the perfect lament (for me) of a broken love affair in my teens. Saw him do a reading in Eugene, OR in the 70s. Loved it. Still love his work.
The streets of Oporto that ancient port city were a riot of poets it seemed
When the French fell against all odds a local bard intoned
"We were great we were giants we were many"
The people of that port shouted they came together en masse they danced in their waking dreams waving their arms and some probably wept with joy
They sang, by God, and they partied like that as only the people of that port city can
And I'll tell you a secret: those are the ones I want to know.
Portugal Campeão da Europa!
It's about soccer, as we call it. I hope I got that bit in Portugese right! Otherwise, I stand by this poor attempt at a poem and admit to being the author.
There is tragedy in his eyes his soul lays barren there one of three in our family a not so wild pack of hounds loud and obstreperous. He will live until he dies.
Mary Winslow and I have just published a book of our poetry. It's called Dea Tacita and is available on Amazon.com. My email address is [email protected] if you want to send praise. If it's not praise, the addess to use is deadendmail.com. :)