“The Cold War did not end.  It shattered into a thousand dangerous pieces.”

            -from the movie Red Sparrow

PAJARO HERMOSA

I dream in Spanish even though I remember little from a borderline childhood.   

I fell in love with the mariachi song “Volver, Volver” that Harry Dean Stanton sings in the movie Lucky.  I translated it into English but it wasn’t the same poetry.  So I’m on a journey to relearn the language of my youth, of Lorca and Neruda, of cantina dreams.

“Volver, Volver”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77rJ8OSjhdM 

I’m learning to dream consciously if that’s even possible.  Forget about obsessing over the lottery, you’ve already won, at least for a few hours each night.      

Everything is pale in the summer of this place, not like a pink wash of pale morning
light, but rather the tint of hospital walls, without monsoon clouds to paint the shadows golden.   

Everything is pale except for a few good books I devour like Henry Miller, underlining so many passages I’ll never return to them all, an irritating conundrum but not for six billion fellow humans.  Surrounded by soft Serbian chatter, not distracting because I don’t know the words.  The mystic sound of a gypsy camp, their language a forest music.

There are still firsts every day.  Today I ate nothing but vanilla ice cream for lunch on a picnic table next to a weary soldier.  Her . . . 

Apple cheek on apricot wrist

Pistol at her hip
Machine gun slung
Sleeping

O My

Time speeds by
Pen out of ink
I can’t think

Ooo eeee

Strange body whiff
The Taliban blew up the PX
Thank god for Amazon.com

Picnic table, morning tree

Cigarettes, black coffee
Indian laborers sweeping the dust
Happy lonely heart broke

Still tending the roses

Friday mornings
Bird shit on my head
I don’t care

Lonely prickly pear

With only one pad
Coffee grounds in the garden
Trying to grow more

Bark of the locust

Old man skin
Tears form then fall
Strange times of the day

Bought a pack of smokes

To remember the glimmer
Of her face that night
Red-hot ember

Birds are dying
In this dying place
But there are plenty more
To send her way

Walk in the morning

Walk at night
Duct tape covers
A hole in my boot

The days are so long

But nights are without time
Pajaro Hermosa
I’m doing just fine

8/30/18
Afghanistan

“The way of the comets is the poet’s way.  And the blown-apart links of causality are his links.  Look up after him without hope.  The eclipses of poets are not foretold in the calendar.  [He is] the one whose traces have always vanished, the train every one always arrives too late to catch.  For the path of comets is the path of poets: they burn without warming.”

            -from the poem “The Poet” by Marina Tsvetaeva”

Kabul, Afghanistan

“Give me the Corvidae: ravens, crows, magpies, jays, opportunistic scavengers, whom I feel akin to as a mongrel.”

        -from The Road Home by Jim Harrison