Route 66

Tucumcari, New Mexico

THE SILENCE BETWEEN

Rare moments

When the wind stands still
For no more than a few hours
Between great shifts in seasons
Autumn
South to north
When everything waits
For something to happen

Just time enough
For a congregation of monarchs
To confuse the weatherman
With their butterfly storm
Then the wind blows cold
Pushing them all the way to Mexico

When a honeybee winds down
From the season of sweetness
Wearing out its welcome
Drinking
I swat
It stings
I guess bees love sweet whiskey
As much as I do

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

            -Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“In geologic time we barely exist.  I collected memories of my temporary host leaving a trace of words, my simian tracks.”

            -from the poem “Buried Time” by Jim Harrison

SATELLITE TELEVISION SIGNAL LOSS

A cottonwood holds the creek bank. 

She’s deathly allergic to late spring
when its cottony parachutes fill the nests of birds
and blanket new grass like snow. 
She can’t understand
why I spend so much time back there. 
Or my neighbor,
telling me he called the city to have the tree removed,
something about satellite television signal loss.

War Roses

Afghanistan

“I heard on the radio that we creatures have about a billion and a half heartbeats to use. Birds use theirs first as do meth heads and stockbrokers. This morning I’m thinking of recounting mine to see exactly where I am. I warn the hummingbirds out front, ‘just slow down,’ as they chase me away from the falling hollyhocks.”

-from the poem “Sunday Discordancies” by Jim Harrison 

I’m still trying to come to terms with living in a place without time for so long vs. this new place, where the ticking of clock’s razor-sharp hand cuts peoples’ lives into pieces.

Last year in Afghanistan I flew over a bombed-out castle splayed across a high hill overlooking the sprawling city of Kabul.  From the helicopter I could see inside the castle’s great depths, through the twisted remnants of its shattered blue dome, into the dead skeleton inside.  Inside there was a spiral staircase leading to nowhere.  Obviously ancient, the castle was surrounded by a bombed-out stone court with red and pink roses persevering in its fissures and rubble.  War roses, as they are called in Afghanistan.    

I’ve dreamed about that castle and its rose garden and staircase, spiraling not to nowhere, but up through the broken blue glass into a sky dotted with heavy clouds.  On the staircase was not the king, but all his villagers, climbing in pairs, holding hands. 

I think about our billion and a half heartbeats, enough to last eighty years, give or take.  I think about the people of Afghanistan whom are born with half that many, if they are lucky.  I think about how interminable terror and insecurity have robbed them of gratefulness, symptomatic in that they stopped tending the rose gardens, once such a symbol of their grace, gratitude, pride and humanity.  Now they are war roses, left to survive alone in gunpowder places roses aren’t supposed to grow.   

Last year I’d work in a rose garden in the courtyard of a tiny mosque.  It was unkept and overgrown, so I did what I could to prune, rake, mow, sweep and plant.  One day an Afghan woman approached me saying, “I cry every day thinking about this garden.  How you, an American, are its keeper.  How ironic, heh?”  Then she said, “This is the problem with my country.  We don’t take care of our roses anymore.”     

“People forget their spirits easily suffocate so they must keep them far up in tree branches where they can be summoned any moment.  It’s better if you’re outside as it’s hard for spirits to get into houses or buildings or airplanes.  The spirit above anything else is attracted to humility.  If I slept in the streets it would be under the cardboard with me.”

            -from the poem “Spirit” by Jim Harrison

SPRING MEMORY 

It was raining as a male mockingbird sang like Pavarotti from a crabapple tree across the creek.  The tree was as stunning as the birdsong, a brilliant ball of pink-red fire.  I’ve never heard such a loud bird except at the zoo.  Birds sing loudly in spring because they are hungry, but also because they are lonesome, restless and lustful, especially the males.  Perhaps this explains my constant singing from the back patio.     

There is also a peach tree on the creekbank with blossoms the color of a woman’s pink painted lips.  I pruned the tree in early spring so it bled sap.  I put a bead of it on my tongue to see if it tasted like peaches, but it just tasted like sap. 

It reminds me of a peach tree in Afghanistan that was inside a garden with high pocked concrete walls.  Like the country it was deeply wounded, its trunk split by shrapnel from a Taliban rocket.  The rocket scared off the garden’s Afghan caretaker, so I took care of it with two friends.  By late summer the beleaguered tree produced exactly three peaches for the three of us.  We relished them as the tiny miracles we knew they were.      

Crabapple Tree

Shawnee, Oklahoma

Many thanks to Henry Hughes, Craig Schuhmann and Richard 

Bunse (illustrations) at FFTJ for publishing three poems.    

Many thanks to Willard Greenwood and Hiram Poetry Review for 

publishing two of my poems from Afghanistan!

Elvis Pressley's birthplace

Tupelo, Mississippi

“Your nearness was the scent of coffee in a fragile cup.  We talked in fingers of finely entangled thread, distilled in cloistral secrecy, bouquets of white chartreuse.  When you drove to town for the mail, your absence turned the sun’s rays to dangling straw.

      -J.W. Rivers

Rowan Oak

(William Faulkner's home)

Oxford, Mississippi

“I thought love was being vulnerable.  I thought love put an ache in your hands, the kind of ache that begs you to see a body the way the blind do.”

           -Heather Arrington

Rowan Oak

(William Faulkner's home)

Oxford, Mississippi

“Sometimes I sound like gravel.  And sometimes I sound like coffee and crème.”

            -Nina Simone

Square Books

Oxford, Mississippi

“There was a well of spirituality, an understanding of mystery, Wakan Tanka, the Great Mystery that presided over everything.  Spirit Dogs.  That’s what the Sioux had called the horses in the tribal days.  Loyal, intelligent, intuitive, and capable of guiding you to the spirit coursing through you.”

            - from the novel Dream Wheels by Richard Wagamese  

Back Porch

Shawnee, Oklahoma

“The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.  That’s why the taste of it drove us from Eden.  That fruit was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder for use a pinch at a time, a condiment.  God had probably planned to tell us later about this new pleasure.  We stuffed our mouths full of it.”

            -from the poem “Contraband” by Denise Levertov

Crow Visit

Galveston, Texas

“It nearly cancels my fear of death, when I think of cremation.  To rot in the earth is a loathsome end, but to roar up in flames – besides, I am used to it.  I have flamed with love or furry so often in my life, no wonder my body is tired.  We had great joy of my body.  Scatter the ashes.”

-from the poem “Cremation” about something Robinson Jeffers’ wife told him before she died

Near NASA

Houston, Texas

“The Kingfisher rises out of the black wave like a blue flower, in his beak he carries a silver leaf . . . hunger is the only story he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.”

            -from the poem “The Kingfisher” by Mary Oliver

Galveston, Texas

“I look west and hesitate.  I lament.  Here where opposing armies passed through.  Palaces of countless rulers are now but dust.  Empires rise: people suffer.  Empires fall: people suffer.”

            -from the poem “Recalling the Past at T’ung Pass” by Chang Yang-Hao

Galveston, Texas

"Galveston", Jimmy Webb and Lucinda Williams:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bK8wU47BUk

Galveston, Texas

“[We are like] flies crawling on a window, fluttering up and down, seeing the outside beyond reach because of the invention of glass that couldn’t be undone.  We lived within the outside for two million years and now it’s mostly photos.  We chose wallpaper and paint over leaves and rivers.  In our dream of safety we decided not to know the world.”

            -from the poem “Modern Times” by Jim Harrison

“The news from the border this morning and my ensuing rage reminds me of something I once read, ‘This has become a society of so many raw issues that no one can be though to behave well.’”

        -from The Beige Dolorosa by Jim Harrison

LAND OF ENCHANTMENT

A fundamental lesson is to fish without a hook.  Catch and release is a compromise, as much pain for the fish as a tattoo but usually survivable, their essence inked into some permanent crease of my memory made of water and nerves beneath bone. 

There’s a painful silence in the West louder than a sonic boom.  No one can hear it before the coming storm.  CNN and cereal and sleep are a toxic combination during a government shutdown.  It’s important to know what we’ll wear to the grave as we fear for the children already lost.  Everything tastes bad except good whiskey. 

A bourbon for lunch seemed necessary after reading of the xenophobic panic that earth’s magnetic north is hurtling toward Russia at 34 miles per hour every year, a road race in geologic terms.  The bartender mixed a sweet syrup, infused with spice and green chile.  Taking a sip I proclaimed, “Everyday there are still firsts!  What is this?”  “The world’s best breath mint,” she replied. 

Later she caught me pouring whiskey from a flask into my glass while watching nitwit golfers on the driving range duff and slice and cuss, then look around and blame it on their “new club”.  Even I know that success in golf, like everything else worth doing, is about realizing every swing, especially on the driving range, is an artistic endeavor.  Kind of like fishing without a hook.

My new house is a symbol of wilderness encroachment.  For survival and paybacks the critters  tunnel under everything including the bird feeder and the back patio, driving my dog to madness in this looted excavation.       

Sleeping out one night I saw a copperhead weaving its way through the grass in the backyard.  I have considerable experience with rattlesnakes but was unprepared for the copperhead, especially their ability to climb rocks as well as comfortable lawn furniture.        

These cottonwoods dance, they come and go, their bones.  The footsteps of every ghost to wade this creek since it was a creek, washed away by water the color of new blood.  Here now, all at once, like a crowded street corner in Tokyo.  Most wearing moccasins and a few leather boots.   

I can’t keep the squirrels from the bird feeder.  I washed the kitchen window at midnight to watch the morning geese fly between the outstretched arms of two cottonwoods, my new horizon.  Every day I dream about the Land of Enchantment not realizing it’s already here.  

Lucinda

Oxford, Mississippi

Last weekend at a downtown diner, Wayne, a serious talker, took one look at my Stetson saying, “You’ve got to go see that old hat at Cash’s Western Store.  Evidently some Indian brought it in eighty years ago after he’d been shot in the head.”

Per the French poet Rene Char, “You have to be there when bread comes fresh from the oven.”  So, I drove to Cash’s in Seminole where I was greeted by Joe, an ancient cowboy with three missing fingers, a result of “the goddamn rodeo!”  Joe said he was watching the store for his brother, recuperating after a large heifer rolled over on him.  I asked Joe about the old hat, which he pulled it from the top shelf.  There it was, a big old dusty black beaver Stetson with a round crown and a seven-inch flat brim.  Sure enough, it had a small hole in the back, covered by a piece of felt. 

Joe confirmed the story, that it was brought in by a Seminole during the depression.  And that he’d been shot in the back of the head, but by the time the bullet entered the hat, it petered out, falling on his head. 

This was too good to be true, so I told Joe this was an obvious yarn.  If I had such lucky hat with the added bonus of being bullet proof, I’d wear it into the grave.  To which he replied, “Yur prob’ly right, but don’t tell no one.  It’s the only reason anyone comes to this ol’ store anymore.  Sure sounds like sumpthin’ an old Indian would tell a white feller, doesn’t it?”

Medicine Creek

Medicine Park, Oklahoma

“Thank you for the river and what it says.  It doesn’t matter which one.  Whether it’s a trickle or a rush, they each say the same thing, and I’m beginning to believe that it may be everything – the high of the water’s joy, that stifled cry of the earth’s wet hot desire to go on living.”

            -from “What the River Says” by Nathan Brown

Comanche and Kiowa country

Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma

“I am richer than Santana the Kiowa chief if you subtract those millions of verdant acres which we did.”

            -from “Hello Walls” by Jim Harrison

Rainbow Trout

Medicine Creek

“There’s enough in a river to bleed out anything.”

            -from “On the Wabash” by Henry Hughes   

Medicine Creek

Medicine Park, Oklahoma

“There is an eight-foot piece of raw bamboo across my lap soon to become a split cane fly rod.  It will be a totem or temple or another limb anchored to the heart of whoever holds it with a line drawn deep into the clean water it reaches toward.”

            -from “Letters From a Lost Creek” by Jimmy Watts

Echinocereus reichenbachii

Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma

“This capacity to wonder at trifles – no matter the imminent peril – these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.”

            -Vladimir Nobokov

Medicine Park, Oklahoma

“How miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature.  There were eternities during which it did not exist.  And when it is all over . . . nothing will have happened.  For this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life.”

            -Friedrick Nietzsche

Wichita Mountains, Oklahoma

“ . . . about the Native American situation, he said everything’s a matter of time, that though it’s small comfort the ghosts have already nearly destroyed us with the ugliness we’ve become, that in a few hidden glades in North America half-human bears still dance in imperfect circles.”

            -from “After Ikkyu” by Jim Harrison

Medicine Creek

“What is living but to grow smaller, undress another skin or scale away rough edges the way rivers cut mountains down to the heart . . . We know the history of sand.  We know water and air trying to break the spirit of stone.  We know our teeth grinding down to their pith.”

            -from “Fishing” by Linda Hogan

Loretta

“The sixteenth-century Korean poet, Song Chong-Win, says the best way to understand how to live is to ‘fish without catching any.’”

            -from The Art of Angling: Poems About Fishing, edited by Henry Hughes

Afghan Rose

photo by Jesse O.

She whispered,

“Frosted petals, winter linens.  
Barnwood lining, cream quality.”

An Afghan rose pushes the sky one last time, 
burdened by water. 

Taos memory, 
Muse of the Southwest.  
Pilgrimage cemetery in the park.  
Penitente heart, penitente wind 
crying in a cottonwood grove.   
Bark magnetized,   
toothy taste for the gods.  
Dog’s collar, bleached white bones.  
Disco dance under broken bourbon glass 
      trinkets and tin, 
         spinning
               slivers of silver December light.  
Icons of yarn and nip, 
      paperback strips 
         stuck in the sweet grass.  
The sky windblown gray.  
Solar radio (101.9) hum, 
a cougar crosses the sidewalk 
looking for water.  
Old man's face a walnut
or cottonwood bark.
Old Man River cold and low 
but the water boils from a skinny dipping spring.  
“A Love Supreme”.       

Her voice, the cat’s meow, the Red River falling above Questa.  Up canyon, pine bough strings strum.  Her wind sings.  His colorless dreams, white on black.  Snow falls on great-grandmother’s raven coat.  He prayed the snow would kiss desert lips in December.  Prayer answered.  High on the mountain - nieves penitentes pointing dead fingers to the noonday sun. 

His Russian pocket watch keeps no time.  
Just to remember this place by.  
The vulgarity of clocks, 
burden of drifting time, 
heavy as water.

Over yonder in Kabul skeletons creep to the radio tower.  Refugees returned with nothing on their backs but sacks of adobe bricks.  Nothing but the poppies grow, this dreadful drought.  Someday the rain’s gonna fall, washing them all back down.  Bricks, bones, riverbed clog.    

They speak our language but we can’t speak theirs.  They sound so different but they all look the same.  Disposable clothes.  American hoodie hegemony.    

Solar radio on the high plain then descent into faint metallic static of cutbank shadows, the white noise of flowing water and fog running low.  A magpie sings to her lover undercover canopy of cottonwood, tail above nest.  Water low before the melt, river grass still except for a single blade twitch.  Cutthroat trout.      

Afghan boys stacking sand bags all day.  
Ugandan guards, Kalashnikovs 
slung like gunmetal guitars.  
The insider threat is real 
as he smokes the Serbians dance 
to his Texas country blues.  
Sun shining, nose red, 
tobacco cowboy's rough 
as the lizard boots he’s wearing.    

Thanksgiving came and went.  It should be his favorite holiday, but like attending mass it comes with a sense of irony.  His favorite days are all those in-between, forgotten by history’s economic calendar, like today.  He feels irony about Christmas although different.  But this year Christmas bourbon, sleeping bag on the patio, sparrows in the snow.  O he’ll never forget to hang the lights again.

Every evening a pinch of Afghan dust to the wind.  Looking down at all the layers between.  Pretty soon all he’ll have to do is look to the west as the sun sets.  

This is the end, he’s leaving.  On a high desert plain framed by blue mountains, a beginning.   

Afghan Rose Suite

Photo by Jesse Onkka

“The limitless starlight above me shines from suns that extinguished a billion years ago.  It is impossible to grasp the idea that nothing is ever created or destroyed, that everything always was and still is and only changes in shape or form or frequency, traveling on a wave of light and a story that doesn’t end.”

            -from “Once: Letters From a Lost Creek” by Jimmy Watts

Afghan Rose Suite

Photo by Jesse Onkka

“Gods have long abandoned the banality of war though they were stirred by a hundred year-old guitarist I heard in Brazil, also the autistic child at the piano.”

            -from “The Theory and Practice of Rivers” by Jim Harrison

Afghan Rose Suite

Photo by Jesse Onkka

“How did we get to a place where to have an opinion is more culturally rewarded than to have a question?”

            -Maria Popova

Afghan Rose Suite

Photo by Jesse Onkka

“Writers and politicians share an embarrassed moment when they are sure all problems will disappear if you get the language right.”

            -from “The Theory and Practice of Rivers” by Jim Harrison