Billy Boy

 Billy was the daredevil one of the three brothers as I recall.

Hard for me to keep my rare cousin’s names straight at first.

He always had a tilted head, burr haircut and a sheepish grin, 

a more “Summered” older kid than I.

We younger ones watched fellows like him with awe,

hoping someday to wander with the same easy swagger.

When we visited, my dad would mock and tease all of us boys 

with grins and proclamations followed by a wink. 

He would caw at us his false remorse,

“You better hope I never die, or you'll be the ugliest men in the world”,

Billy would always smirk and lob a drawled retort

back to the uglier sender and the source.

Amid dusty Jacksboro Texas cricket-filled nights, hot days, a yard full of small

army soldiers waged ceaseless wars. Behind their house lived the Gazette, 

full of ink and oil smells and clackity-press percussions. 

We got to feed yesterday’s old cast letters, and our secreted curse words,

back to the molten maw of the Linotype pot, never to be seen again.

The shop was carpeted in discarded pages, their wording not yet right.

We patrolled on BB-gun hunts down alleyways with Daisy rifles tight in hand.

The wire-perched birds flapped away to the safety of the sky

as we strode through town. Bottles and cans were not so lucky.

Then back behind the post office, the heavy-oily-onion air swirled out of Mary’s Burgers, 

whispering of hot and salty French fry heaven.

Ketchup was always free.

As a Tiger on the town football team, Billy roamed Jack County’s miles

till life's call urged him to another campus. Perhaps a million days ago, 

we lunched with him there a time or so until he faded away.

While cleaning his gun, one warm and sad May afternoon, Billy’s story ended.

A puff of smoke, we blinked our eyes, and he was gone. 

Surely Billy Boy was never meant to be

the ugliest man in the world.

Chirp

evening cricket songs

  woven in to golden light

-small letters of love

Flamingos

Flamingos lounging in tropical waters along side exotic flowers

You stand so still and I have not seen you duck your head for the longest. 

Perhaps your are full from an unseen early morning breakfast?

So poised, tall and pink, nothing is of concern to you

standing on your wire legs.

The entirety of their silly flamboyance seems oblivious

to store, with all our eyes and shuffling sounds, 

even the  children are no cause for alarm.

They must be proud birds, perhaps they are all ashamed to be on clearance

here at Walmart

2 for $20.

Packing List

For me it is a cry, a wail, of pure unsatiated yearning.

So many years of moves 

and changes 

and towns.
Ever more moving boxes and new class rooms and faces.

All so wonderfully new at first, 

to learn and meet and explore. 

Only to leave behind again and mostly forget 

as a small bit of past.  

somewhere else, now no longer new.

No one stayed in my pocket or my conversations. 

They faded away. Just gone 

and papered over with aa new address.

So many years of places and small stories have flipped by 

and are now too deep in the deck. 

Too far gone. 

Just gone and replaced

when no one was packed up 

and labeled on my box

and sent along with me

to help me remember 

who they ever were.

Dog Tired

 The Dogwood leaves are tired and drawn by the 31 

 hot and dry August days.

They dangle, painted bruise-brown, with the pallor 

of old raisin-tasting wine. Far past its prime.

Their green is long gone.

Their work is done,

They wait to fall 

away.

Losses

last years Robin hen

returns to prepare her nest

-culls the cold blue shell

Home on the Rain

most Portland days

this mossy yard stays sodden

feeding cold rivers

Between Two Mirrors

 

Time. Its name is whispered, scrawled, and mumbled in so many ways. Its face reflected in countless mirrors and dissolved into the many waters of the world.

Seasons of growth and learning, dead leaves and then new. Wrinkles, stooped height, growth rings, wisdom, minutes then inches, infirmity, rotting wood and patinas of every hue.

The flow from tide to yet another tide, months, calendars, addresses and anniversaries, cakes and cards, greying hair, the muting of senses, the cutting of young curls, births and mistakes, victories, and death.

We measure people with small pencil marks on door frames or by clothes that no longer fit. From seed to stem then leaf, to cone and broken limb. Then a harvested trunk with some of it as sawdust scattered on the floor. Hair changes color and fades in color and vitality.

Christmas, survival, recovery, mountains fading slowly to hills, the dimming of stars, first impressions and then urns and good byes, the resolutions, the dreams and trophies and the long kept dresses and jackets and the glory of what was then.

Time brings it all to bear with only the quiet whisper from the sands that continue their steady fall

 

from the top,

 

down to the bottom

 

of the glass.

Rejoice

  

Tear down that sculpted,

perfect mountain that lives in your head.

Its intimidation is not for all,

and most certainly not for you.

It won’t tell you of its jagged faults

and glacier-scoured rock, and will

surely not whisper of the legions of fallen snags

and centuries of eroded pebbles and sand

that are now missing. All lost to gravity,

drawn somewhere downhill.

 

Scores of acres lie scorched and bared by fires.

Scarred firs still trying to fully breathe, tremble

in winter winds up past the scree slopes

on its southeast side.

Legions of beetles chew into the bark

of its sheltering forests, killing the branched

beings with a million tiny torturous bites.

Delivered daily in unison

 

That perfect mountain’s stone heart once flowed.

Growing upward from the depths as molten

magma, its heart did finally stop. It cooled

and lay hardened for eons

and grew no more.

 

It casts a mighty silhouette.

Impressive and prominent, sometimes snow-topped

with orange and red hues in, “the golden hours of the day.”

But it is succumbing to earth’s eternal pull.

 

Your seemingly mighty and tall mountain is far from perfect.

2020

 

In one hand I hold

The wetness of tears, the rain that falls upon the robes

of people and hopes everywhere.  Lost hopes, lost jobs,

hunger, sickness, death, isolation and loneliness, protests and pain,

frustration, hoarding, politicization of the scenario,

pot-stirring, personal and national debts that tower above us all.

Beliefs, not news nor facts.

To fill the other hand, I have to find

the awareness, to look for and see the light.

In the other-worldly quiet nights, long walks, a flowering spring

that dazzles because I have the time to see it unfold

before me with clearing air from less used machines,

the working of jig saw puzzles with my family

and listening as my daughter discovers the quiet satisfaction

of the NYT crossword and rediscovers here love of the piano,

experiencing spring like I had not done in 50 years or more.

 

Friendliness and courtesy and communal help

for those in need seems to be also blossoming around me

 in the small and not so small parts of the world I bump in to

But If I squint my eyes just right, I can see the good, the hope and care

wearing a shirt of fear and worry.

This time has blessed us with a flaneur’s world, while it has cursed us with an anger,

a dread and divide that may not ever subside, or so I fear

as I hold my breath and wait.

Paid

 

my work is for a salary,

but when I capture the right words,

then mine is the golden pay.

Falling Down the Hill

 

We moved a lot.

Over many blurry years while growing up,

I didn’t really think much about the world passing around me.

Only the merest of plans would float through my thoughts.

Little was permanent. We just followed the moving truck.

 

Along the way, a low-grade shame slowly crept into me,

like a fever of 99.4. I felt a little off from not having enough of something,

but not quite sure exactly what that something was.

Maybe it was not getting that other half stick of gum from mother,

or the skipped lunches replaced by a coke and a packet of peanuts. 

Sometimes I still dream about whole sticks of gum, hamburgers, or a real Schwinn bike.

My friends, thunder and lightning storms,

did manage to follow me to each new house. I still love them so.

They, like the moves and cardboard boxes, were the constants in my life.

Sequential memories seemed to start for me in Houston.

We finally ate hamburgers the day we moved in.

They were served on waxy paper set on moving box tables, and it felt special.

Then Kennedy was shot, Kindergarten, smallpox and sugar-cubed polio vaccines all happened, and I even decided to call myself Alan for a while in first grade.

No one else was named Greg. It felt safer.

 

Dad found an old, discarded cheese barrel one day. It became a table

in each new living room after that. Once the furniture was in place, I would crawl

over to it and sniff the round hole in its side.

Always checking if it still reeked of its original occupant.

I got a belt with a buckle and then went to my first rodeo.

That Christmas, Santa brought me a used Wards bike that had belonged to a neighbor girl.

Never was quite sure how that worked out.

 

After Houston came L.A, then second grade back to TX, then third in LA.

Caddo Parish was home till Thanksgiving of sixth grade,

then it was off to Dallas.

 

In each new school I was introduced as

the new kid from somewhere else, standing in front of a room

full of eyes and faces that I didn’t know.

From one handhold to the next. Some safer than others.

Some friendlier, some not.

Roll the dice.

 

Towns faded in the rearview mirror. Around four I waved

goodbye to my first dog that we left in Wyoming.

On to the next sunrise ahead.

During sixth grade, and seven states

later, my next dog Charlie got hit by a car while we walked one afternoon.

 

That constant move from town to town set a rhythm in my head.

I heard it in the background.

I felt it in my stomach.

It was my soundtrack.

Playing over and over. Time to go.

 

As a younger version of me, the art of imagining, of planning or projecting

forward more than three steps down the path, was thrown out,

all from lack of use.

 

There were always new faces but not the real joy of knowing any of their secrets

or that hidden place that folks born there knew about, nor my place

in any one’s history very long.

I was just passing through.

A couple of thousand suns set, and I seldom wept for any of them.

 

That implanted, learned impatience lived in me for so long, demanding me

to hurry up, on to some vague Eden elsewhere over the horizon.

But it never told me where that was. Impatience still hangs around.

So many new address', classrooms, introductions,

moving boxes, Welcome Wagons, and expendable new names to learn

at the next new house. It was the thrill of anticipation more than

anything that seemed to get me through, that got me to buy in and move on.

 

Birthdays brought me weariness and settling for whatever

my arms could gather instead

of what could be.

My head had told me my plans didn’t change where I was going.

Just take what is there. Settle. The final option.

I forgot the taste of what I had wanted

and kept licking the same old thing, That thing left in my head.

Living and eating what was in my hands,

not my hopes or what I wanted from the menu.  

 

Till it was tasteless,

colorless, threadbare.

Suite 256

 

Oncology.

The referral had been to see a blood specialist. She said,” blood.” The sign

plainly     reads     Oncology. The door, that belongs to the sign, leads in to

a waiting room, half full of sallow faces. A dozen

un-asked for words now crowd their way into our heads to wait with us.

As we enter, the receptionist speaks on the phone with

a funeral home in full earshot of all. Everyone hears

the details she blandly discusses. We sit down

as her words sink in. We hadn’t thought past the word, anemia.

 

Lots of coughs,

some wear masks but not many.

It’s the lottery. We all will be returning for new. The weight

is so real and so enormous, breathing is hard.

It’s agreed: tricked is how we feel. Misled or un-led. Oncology was

not the word used by the doctor. Perhaps

in kindness, to not cause worry, stress or simply panic.

 

I can now see

two presenters at an awards show on TV. They seem to be fondling the envelope

while bantering a bit to stretch the time. Finally, one of them slides their finger

into the sealed flap

and withdraws the card from inside and begins to read the determination for

all to hear. The camera cuts away and the announcers reveal

there is nothing until next time. See

you next month.

Reclamation

 

Be brave. Be careful. Be hopeful.  Go outside and yell, “I am back!” Yell it one more time. Feel it.

In honor of what masks have done for us all, burn a mask; then burn one more. Give thanks. Take another and tie it around a tree that you will see every day. Remember masks are evidence that people are putting others first. Find a reason to ask your neighbor for a cup of sugar. Make something to share with a friend or two.


Imagine yourself at a party. You can see the faces as you walk around and pass by different guests. Imagine them as everyone you have missed. Then invite a friend over for coffee. Sit in chairs or on the steps or on the grass in the sun.

Walk out your front door and keep walking. Listen to nothing other than birds and your breathing. Turn off your thoughts. Don’t just nod at people. Make a point to start greeting people you pass from this day forward. Start with a small hello will. Even through a mask, words still work. Ask them how they are, and care about their answers.

 Enroll your dog in a doggie daycare class once a week. They need to relearn things too, not just left to rely on old sniffed note cards left on the grass or trees. Those afternoons while your dog is out for class, take off and go have a drink at a small tavern or coffee shop. Bend the rules. Sit on a stool at the bar and talk to the person serving you with real talk. Tell them your name and learn theirs.

Who have you missed? Call each and every single person on your list and check in on them, maybe invite them out for a walk. Talk. Catch up. Share your experience. Find out what you do not know. Smile and feel happy. Replace news with music. Fill your space with music. Fill your life back up.

Become a regular at a local farmers market. Buy flowers for your table and while you are at it, plant something and care for it. Include this nurture and appreciation in your new routine. Take long soaking hot baths on occasion. The shower can wait. Make the weekend last a bit longer. Prepare a room in your place where electronics are not allowed. Make an appointment to go there often. No Media Monday’s. Phone- free Fridays. You get to choose.

Step out on your porch or find a park, or a bench somewhere, and drag a book that’s been sleeping over on the shelf along for the ride. See the sun, feel the rain, enjoy what is now. It will take persistent effort to break down the wall that has been growing between us.  Keep at it.

 

Be a beacon. Wash your hands. Trust each other. Don’t believe the hype, you’ve already won. Now help someone else to win. 

Work or Life

Work is not all it is reputed to be.

Mostly it’s time away from living

with periods of accomplishment and pride

in exchange for paying bills mixed.

there’s security and the means for needs

all the while diverting me from richer time

with people and the ooh’s and ahh’s of the world.

A itchy shirt made from a big sack of money, stress,
rental cars, keyboards, cell phones, email, clocks and
airplanes all filled with more work and time staring through a small hole.

Take all that all, shaken with determination until in proper proportions,
spiced with gifted vacation days that we feed ourselves sparingly.

Sprinkled like it was salt. Like some was great and made life taste good                                         but too much might spoil the balance.

Go ahead, pour it down my throat till I am just grateful enough
to not throw up my resume.

But then could I take a big shot at living please?

Them

The rusted detritus of 163 different lives bleeds out

down the hills of Sullivan's Gulch, down to the train tracks,

ending in random slides of waste beside the rails. Down.

They’re barely alive. Skin-living under clouds and boxes, tarps

and weary sway-backed tents. Surrounded by legions of dismembered

bikes and long-orphaned wheels. Nothing left but their stuff.

Their wet everything: sleeping bags and shoes and orange needle caps,

empty cans, dead TV’s. Yesterday’s scrawled cardboard pleas

wilted floppy by the rain become today’s rug for muddy paths.

 

Sallowed and soured nylon caves with no welcome or a mat

Enslaved grocery carts spilling their treasures encircle

the refuse and the refused. Childless indentured strollers await.

Rain and more rain slides down blue-ish tarped camps guarded by brambles,

the dead and alive razor-wire that stands the lonely

tangled watch at night. Sipping blood from any careless slip.

 

The anarchy of their spiraled lives scares us;

they blame us, despise us, but take our crumbs, our shun, our change and wait.

Bodies, people, someone's girl or dad or uncle, sit numb and stand paused.

We say we try. We meet, we study, we throw coins and food and socks and scorn.

Cities and states and our nation gnash their teeth, say they try, and yet the years click on by

and all the    “we’s”      just     can’t     seem   to   pull   the right answer out of the hat.

 

We, the world so thankful to avoid the vague accusatory stares. We

there, in our cars, nearing the corner. What if the roulette wheel says,

“Hey you,” in the front row in the stop-light queue, kneel down, you’re next?

 

It’s time for you to hold the sign and fade from sight.

No Sense

 

I did not see or really think much about the world

passing around me for many years. Only the simplest of plans in my thoughts

My head felt some things pass through like fear or lust, maybe some shame 

in my pocket from not enough, from one handhold to the next.

Impatience hung around the longest; hurry was always leading me to somewhere.

Admiration and wonder escaped from me, along with friends and the joy of stories. A thousand sunsets died and I never waited and wept for them. I was on the lookout for sunrise.

After so many new address's, I grew complacent and settled for in-arms-reach instead of further than the moment.

I forgot the taste of new and kept licking the same old "now", 

till threadbare. 

Granny’s Fairies

We cousins readied for bedtime on Granny's sleepin' porch.
Six mouths haphazardly brushed, repeated glasses of water as whined for,
most of us here overnight for the first time.
The Dr. Pepper snoozed in the fridge not ten steps away.

She attended us so well, her hair braided up in a bun,
with a crossed left eye that never really look at you squarely
and an old tobacco bag pinned to her brassiere that
held the funds for our Army-Navy store desires.

There was cotton clipped to each of the window screens
to warn the birds away, so she claimed,
and she had fed hobos lunch on the outside table long ago,
taking care of all that came her way from the tracks behind the pastures.

Mounded deep with mismatched pillows and
flour-sack quilts sewn by years of hands and thread,

the old swayback beds waited folded back, nice and neat,
then were loaded up with two or three cousins each.

The old rock salt crystals that grew in the bowl

atop the heater sparkled with table-lamp light.
The swamp cooler blew slow, stale, sweet air trying to let go of summer heat.
It was the cool of the darkening evening and as the sun slipped from the sky,
she drew us to the windows that faced the back yard.

"There, she exclaimed, do you see 'em coming?"
We pressed our faces to the glass, peering out into the falling deep dark.
"I call 'em to protect you all on my sleepin' porch. Here come my fairies!"

The scattered twinkling of tiny lights came towards us,

up from the horse pasture, even appearing higher-up in the trees.
You could just make out the advancing line of fairies, spreading out
across the yard, each signaling their allegiance to us all
for the long heavy night.

Those conjured fireflies delivered that which could not be denied.

We believed and slept deep and safe in the sleep of quiet invincibility.
Soon it would be tomorrow, and time again for swings

and tomatoes and salt and watermelon

and maybe even a sneaked small taste of Dr. Pepper if you dared.

 Old Version:

We cousins readied for bedtime on Granny's sleepin' porch.
Six mouths haphazardly brushed, repeated glasses of water as whined for,
most of us here overnight for the first time.
Dr. Pepper snoozed in the fridge not 10 steps away.

She attended us so well, her hair braided up in a bun,
with a crossed left eye that never really look at you squarely
and an old tobacco bag pinned in her brassiere that
held the funds for our Army-Navy store desires.

There was cotton clipped to the window screens
to warn the birds away , so she claimed,
and she fed hobos lunch on the outside table long ago,
taking care of all that came her way from the tracks behind the pastures.

Old swayback beds were dressed and folder back
Then loaded with two or three cousins each
Mounded deep with mismatched pillows
Flour sack quilts sewn by families of hands and thread.

The old rock salt crystal that grew in the bowl atop the heater sparkled with table lamp light-
the swamp cooler blew slow, stale, sweet air trying to let go of the summer heat
It was the cool of darkening evening and the sun slipped from the sky
And she drew us to the windows that faced the backyard.

"There! Do you see 'em coming?" She exclaimed,
as we pressed our faces to the glass -peering out into the falling deep dark.
"I call 'em to come protect you all that rest on my sleepin' porch. Here come my fairies !"

The scattered twinkling of little tiny lights came towards us
up from the horse pasture, even appearing higher up in to the trees
You could just make out the advancing line of fairies spreading out
Across the yard, each plead hugging allegiance to us all
for the long heavy night.

Even now I recall that night as the first time I witnessed true magic. It was as close as We all ever got I suppose. True and magical wonderment springing from my granny's conjuring old ways of love.

Those conjured fireflies delivered that which could not be denied - we believed and slept deep in the sleep of invincibility and barely even whispered.
Soon it would be tomorrow, and time again for tomatoes and salt and watermelon and a sneaked taste of Dr Pepper if you dared.

Columbine

 

Exhale.

Breathe 

and remember,

Columbine
is still a beautiful flower


growing
wild in the Gorge.

With no bullets,

only petals.

Again

 

The testament of geologic scars layered in blown sand and silts
and ancient muds, holds the fossiled record of the long before.

Oh, the written muds. Progeny of water and stone.

Recorders of the past, Earth’s humble history pages.

Grand peaks and trenches, mighty dips and fractures within a plated crust
undergird the fractional soils we dig and scratch upon.
We beings mere birds at our continuous dust bath. Fluttering over and again.

 

Rock and water live on and on in eternal lives
while the lapping “we’s” of the world in all our might and industry

so slightly sculpt the thin soil. Tilling

and plowing our faint, fleeting ripples here and there.

 

The highest peaks have been laid low to the deepest seas
only to be vulcanized and thrust upward once more,

along spreading ocean-ridges, mountaintops or in island births anew.

 

Fissured cracks and dikes that flowed with molten stone,
cooled and re-smelted with golden veins and crystals

grown cavern-deep, segregated, in their sparkling prismatic skin.

Aged blue glaciers patiently gather the bounty from the clouds, and in

their slow incremental journey, return it to the sea. Reunited oceans

rise up to fall afresh, to flow and freeze, to re-carve the land, and deny drought.

Blowing and sprouting and rooting legions of slumbering natal seeds.

 

Countless caves weep with earthly seeps. Water with aged potter’s hands,

drawing down and gathering up the dripped precipitated change.
These drips have shaped our lands, washed our faces, greened our crops, only

to return and cool, and slake our unrelenting, biologic, thirsty needs again.

 

Rivers bear ice-melt, rain, and mountain alike, carefully and slowly back to the seas.

The very water in our cup has seen, has witnessed and bathed kings and nomads,

and hosted the first sparks and birth of life, only to fall upon it all endlessly again.

 

I have wondered in a whisper with myself,
which formidable element of change reigns supreme?



Stone, the so impressive, erupted from volcanoed cones,

graven god, temple wonders, cities, poured and graveled roads,

dams and mountains high, to the stacked layers cut in canyons low

or the water dripped like clock ticks, in falling rain, calving bergs, maelstrom,

tide or tidal wave and rivers-run with its relentless, tireless tongue,

slowly licking the mountains down to naught?

Both sit among the lofty seats of change, but there is one other that sets the course;

One that beats out the pace, beats out each step and crack, counts each layer and drip.

Time demands patience and is the maestro whose baton will say or not, yes, “again.”