My father passed away peacefully on Sunday morning. I missed seeing him by a few hours and have been in Portland with the family all week. I wrote a piece on my father a few months ago when he was having a high school auditorium dedicated to him. If you’d like to read it you can CLICK HERE. Tomorrow we commit his ashes to the earth and celebrate with family and friends his rich and dedicated life. It will be a good day with friends and loved ones and I’ve no doubt he’ll be there, baton in hand, directing the whole procedings as if it was one of his concerts or a march down Main Street. He was always the consumate showman and we’ll do our best to get it right, to do him proud.

Below is a well-known poem by Robert Hayden that says so much about understanding love and its many ways of being expressed. I’ve also included one I wrote this week in his honor.

 
Clyde Moore 1921-2007 

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden 

********** 

We Remember Him
 
for what he loved: music
first and country, the beauty
of a woman, her brilliant smile,

a small dusty town, the kids
who picked up a flute, lifted
a trumpet to their lips, rolled

a pair of drum sticks between
their fingers for the first time.
Like a pearl the legacy of a man

is ground and polished by the grit
of tenacity, unwavering generosity.
We are what we do every day: rising

to dress, the long walk to work, stoking
the holy spark of others to flame.
I gave a damn, his life says. And like

the sassy-sweet croon of a sax hanging
on a high note, such a man echoes
forever in the hearts of the living. 

It started with a trip to CompUSA to buy a monitor, a fancy, big, groovy monitor to hook up to my laptop. The day before I’d been to Best Buy and bought one there, but it didn’t have speakers and was too small, because I’ve got to have a widescreen to match the screen on my laptop. We (my tech guy, Jeff really did it all) set it up and plugged it in and it looked too plain, didn’t have any pizzazz, so we (Jeff, really) packed it all up and slipped it back in its box, re-hooked up the old one and there we left it until the morning when I got back in my car and returned it to Best Buy. From there I hopped on the freeway to Redondo Beach, because, as luck would have it, the Culver City Comp USA didn’t have the monitor I wanted, the one Jeff and I spent a good half-hour scouring the internet for, the one that had speakers and a 22 inch screen. It was ten in the morning so the traffic was good and I zipped along the 405 for the twelve miles, aware that on my left, the 405 south was crawling along, (due to a tanker overturning farther up the freeway, I heard on the radio).

After backtracking a couple of times on Hawthorne Blvd I pulled into the parking lot. The salesman at CompUSA snapped me up as I walked in the door and promptly checked his stock on the VX2235wm and confirmed they had six of them. He commandeered a rolling ladder that took him up to the tallest shelf in the place and pulled down my new monitor, asking me before it even hit the bottom of the shopping cart whether I wanted to purchase the Extended Warranty that CompUSA offered. Insurance, he said and explained how much of a hassle it would be if something went wrong with it and I had to return it to the manufacturer; packing it and shipping it to their service center, while with CompUSA, well, with them, I could just bring it in and they’d replace it, no questions asked, for the same model, or a newer model of comparable value—for two years, he said. After sharing with him my philosophy on insurance; that it was gambling, that it was all about the risk factor, I declined the offer. He heartily agreed with me that insurance was a racket, but wanted to point out it was only $49.99 for the protection plan, and that was for two years and he highly recommended it.

I took my monitor home in the trunk of the car, slid it into my office, didn’t open the box until after lunch, marveling at how sleek and Star Wars it looked, how it had such a presence sitting there on my desk, even if it wasn’t plugged in yet and no image was flitting across it’s pearly surface. I’ve been upgrading computers since the ‘80’s and every time a new piece of hardware lands on my desk, whether it is a mouse, a keyboard or a back-up drive, there’s a thrill that is akin to (I imagine) how the pioneers felt when they put a new wheel on the wagon or blade on the plow. My feeling is if you have to work with machines they should not only perform at a high level, but give you pleasure when you lay your eyes and hands on them. This monitor was all of that—promising many happy hours marveling at its attributes.

By now you must realize that not every fairy tale has a happy ending. And that, of course, goes for computer tales as well. What was to be a "simple install" was fraught with perplexing, mysterious and downright contentious “issues” between the laptop and the monitor. Although the laptop (a Japanese model) said it would support the monitor and could project the high resolution necessary to view images in a normal perspective—well, they were speaking different languages. Calls to ViewSonic (by Jeff, of course) didn’t help. Calls to Toshiba were close to worthless. Installing this driver and that driver, upgrading the BIOS (I have no idea what that means) had no effect at all. When set to the desired resolution the icons on the Desktop ran off the sides of the screen, simply disappearing into the ethers. We’ve (mostly Jeff, again) have tried everything, including considering a faith “computer” healer to simply realign the aura of this obviously recalcitrant laptop. Nothing we have done has brought a whit of change to the dysfunctional relationship these two pieces of equipment have with each other.

By the end of all this I was one fried and wigged out gal; eyes crossed and brain numbed to the point of zombie-ism. I had counted on this technology to ease my stress, to allow me more creative freedom and now, NOW, it seemed an insolvable “issue.” I went to bed early and hoped (as sometimes does happen) that the answer would come in a dream (to Jeff, of course, who would be able to understand it) and that in the morning, the sun would be shining, the birds singing and my laptop and monitor would have made up and decided to shed their differences and embrace—to co-operate and align themselves for my sake and for the sake of their kind. I believed it was possible. Miracles do happen. Yes, but when I woke up in the morning the sun was hidden by clouds and soon it began to rain. It hasn’t stopped all day. Jeff has gone skiing for a week and, as you can see, I’m typing away, looking right into the heart of my new monitor, finding that in spite of resolution “issues,” the words still find their way to the page. And, even though I didn’t get that protection plan I can return the monitor for a full refund within 21 days of purchase. I’m at 20 and counting.

Here’s a fun poem that somewhat expresses the frustration (nay, exasperation) I was feeling yesterday:

POEM

"It’s only me knocking on the door
of your heart" whined the radio
while I bawled feverishly, eating
an orange, salting it up a little.

A gelatin light squeezed windows
I had watched all night at, bored,
lordy was I bored. I thought maybe
some bombers would fly over or

something. No, I was really nuts,
miserable. I called Jan and John
and Al and Waldemar and Grace and then
got scared, hung up, screamed!

and couldn’t get out a window
because I’d locked them all, because
I’m six flights up. And it’s been a
terribly cold winter, radio’s been broke.

Frank O’Hara
Poems Retrieved
Grey Fox Press

Not only did my husband bring me roses, he arranged them, tied bows around the vase, took a photo and gave me that, as well. They look a little disheveled, like they’re jockeying for position, while their stems slide along the bottom of the vase, causing them to tilt, scrunch or hang awkwardly out the side. I feel a little like this myself on a day-to-day basis trying to corral the items strewn across and piled upon my desk, tend to the phone calls, errands and chores that accumulate expoentially if I don’t line them up and knock them down regularly. Inevitably when I slack off, well, that’s when my feet start sliding, a deep fog rolls into my frontal lobe and the ascending piles begin to rock and then slither helter-skelter across the desktop or onto the floor, crashing down upon the smooth surfaces of my mental order. But, all good analogies have to end somewhere and unlike these roses, this disarray does not smell sweet to the nose, brush the cheek softly or light up a room with color. Telephone bills (no one just has "a" telephone bill anymore), grocery lists starting with beets and ending with toothpaste, and insurance claim forms to be submitted, rarely inspire poems, (although I can’t say they never have) and any tears shed over them will be surely be ones of frustration, not the sweet tenderness that rose petals evoke when strewn upon a path.

It’s been a week and they are still in their vase, having never fully opened, rusting around the edges and the water in the vase has gone murky. I will leave Monday for Florida and don’t have the heart to toss them. I’ll leave that to my husband. He brought them into our world. He can usher them out.

Here are a couple of "rose" poems taken off the web at Poets.org. (To see publications by these poets click on their names.)

Go, lovely rose!
by Edmund Waller

Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me
  
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

    Tell her that’s young,
And shuns to have her graces spied,
    That hadst thou sprung
In deserts, where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

    Small is the worth
Of beauty from the light retired;
    Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

    Then die! that she
The common fate of all things rare
    May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

********

The Separate Rose: I
by Pablo Neruda
Translated by William O’Daly

Today is that day, the day that carried
a desperate light that since has died.
Don’t let the squatters know:
let’s keep it all between us,
day, between your bell
and my secret.

Today is dead winter in the forgotten land
that comes to visit me, with a cross on the map
and a volcano in the snow, to return to me,
to return again the water
fallen on the roof of my childhood.
Today when the sun began with its shafts
to tell the story, so clear, so old,
the slanting rain fell like a sword,
the rain my hard heart welcomes.

You, my love, still asleep in August,
my queen, my woman, my vastness, my geography
kiss of mud, the carbon-coated zither,
you, vestment of my persistent song,
today you are reborn again and with the sky’s
black water confuse me and compel me:
I must renew my bones in your kingdom,
I must still uncloud my earthly duties.

Today is my husband and my 34th wedding anniversary. Married January 13, 1973. Seems I’m talking about someone else when I consider how long ago that really was. I’m listening right now to one of my favorite songs from that era, "The Weight" by the Band. It brings friends and places flooding through my heart, a lump in my throat. A certain song, a scent, an old photo–they can transport me into that "me" who still inhabits my soul, who dared to take the road less traveled, who fell in love at first sight, who, even now watches him and wonders how she was so blessed, how they have survived all these years, how they both still believe in the power of love, the triumph of the spirit.

The following is a short piece I wrote a couple of years ago. It will be reprinted as a part of a book on marriage by Shakti Parwha K. Khalsa. I’ve also included a poem I wrote recently and a recording of "our" song. Love to you all!
 

Why Stay Married? 

There is no making sense of why he and I still eat at the same breakfast table, sleep on the same mattress, work out plans for next year and the one after that. Oh, it is totally comprehensible why we first fell together. He was cute, blond with a bit of a mustache, wearing blue jean overalls, a vibe of farm kid mixed with rebel-without-a-cause. Irresistible, at least to me, who hadn’t had much luck in love since letting the high school boyfriend go, our paths set in opposing directions. Yes, at 19 there were hormones involved (little did we know), but, as my numerologist said many years later, the two of us have been linked together for many lifetimes. Brother and sister, or perhaps I was his mother or he the master to my slave. Nevertheless, she says, we are as bound as four hands tightly crossed and held.

We didn’t know each other those first few years of marriage. We hardly knew ourselves. Like a genie in a bottle, there was so much we kept inside, with only smoky whiffs escaping when one of us tried to pry the lid off just a bit. It wasn’t that we didn’t want to know each other. We just didn’t know we needn’t to know. We were busy. We had to maintain a home, pay the bills, go to yoga class, work more than one job at a time (cleaning offices, running a sandwich shop, planting fledgling trees, hauling garbage from summer campgrounds). We had to get-by and move-on. We took a trip to Los Angeles that lasted 28 years. He went to chiropractic school, finished in 1982 and is still showing up every day at the office. I worked, put him through school, raised a child (through potty training, the India program, rebellious teens and world-wide wanderings), as well as searched for my own place in the planetary scheme. We were busy. Did I already say that?

We have a lot of differences. I want to vacation in the Caribbean, lay on the beach, read and contemplate the turning planet. He plans a weekend at Yosemite in the dead of winter to stay in the Awahnee Lodge (#23 on his 100-things-I-must-do-before-I-die list). I want to visit museums, shop, play cards and read poetry. He spends Sunday afternoons watching the Yankees or Raiders, buys a collapsible kayak, periodically proposes we sell our house, get a motor home and roam the country for a few years.

Is it like this in all marriages? I have no idea. I’ve never been married to anyone else. I have seen those TV shows where real-life couples ride bikes together in Belize or hoist the sails in their sailboat named “Forever,” or behold Greek sculpture all the while holding hands, smiling into each other’s shining faces and declaring, “We do everything together. We can’t imagine it any other way.” I really can’t imagine it that way. We do have our joint bank account, IRA’s and local mailing address. We drive the same make of car and get teary eyed when we hear the Moody Blues play our song. We like to go for long drives and talk about moving to a place where pine trees shed three-pronged needles and the sky has a million stars. After we meditate together our voices soften, our hands reach to massage and we laugh about silly things.

You try to make it work, beyond all the odds—two people, born at a different latitude and longitude, separate species of the human race, clumping along on two feet, hearts beating at different rates, each with their own enormous brain full of god-only-knows-what kind of rot designed to tear you away from each other, to make you stand up and scream to the other, “Me, me! It’s about ME!”

Maybe we’ve given up on trying to mold each other to our own specifications. Maybe now we prefer that the other feel safe, supported. We now dare to reveal our fears and find that they are not as far apart as we had at once believed. Chasing the truth in oneself, in the other or in the marriage is an elusive, snakelike creature. At one moment it looks hard and fast, the next it slithers across your consciousness sideways and you see its fluidity, its ability to shapeshift right before your eyes.

My husband and I have not solved all our problems, but we are forgetting more and more that we have them. We are not perfect, but the picture of perfect has grown murky, taken on a surrealistic pattern and tone. We aren’t sure if we are “in love” anymore. What we are sure of is that on a winter day over 30 years ago we vowed to hold the hand of the other, even should our heads roll, and though our heads have rolled this way and that a thousand times over the years, one of us has always reached out a hand to catch it and return it to the other. And then we have walked on. We will always walk on.

As you can see I’ve been taking it easy the last couple of weeks, giving my hands and eyes and head a rest from the computer and allowing myself time to just hang out, which can be ever so irritating until you get used to the idea you don’t have to be online and on top of everything every minute. The holidays evoke mixed emotions for me (ring any bells?) so I usually go into the major ones with caution, wary that I’m prone to the cynic’s point of view and that watching It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf might send me over the edge into the black night of judgment about materialism and fantasy and how all the rituals we so piously deign as originating with the Christian tradition have their roots in pagan Solstice celebrations or Norse mythology or Wall Street entrepeuners. My husband is the festive one in the family and every year gets out the handtruck and swivels the potted sequoia tree into the house, pulls the plastic bins full of ornaments out of the garage and festoons not only the tree, but every flat surface in the living, dining and sun rooms with angels, bells, drums, reindeer, Santas, ribbons and stockings in green, red, gold and silver. I’ve learned to surrender to it all. He loves it. It makes him happy and truthfully, it does serve as a reminder that life is joyous and playful, if you take the time to see it that way.

We stayed in L.A. this year. In the past we’ve used this break from work to travel to India, Bali, Costa Rica, Yosemite, Oregon and other getaways, where we can reflect on the year just passed, make plans for the year ahead and just get out of the magnetic field of the eight million people zipping around Southern California. The weather was superb and the vibe pretty mellow around the city this year. We went on a couple of hikes up in the Hollywood Hills at Runyon Canyon, where dogs are king and can run off leash. We had a delicious Greek dinner at Taverna Tony’s in Malibu with the staff of our chiropractic office; Jane, Lori & Dr. Theo. We didn’t make it to any movies, though we watched Pirates of the Carribean Part 2 and the aforementioned, Elf, on video. Our son, Sat Sangeet, came down from San Francisco for three days over New Years and we played a couple of games of Scrabble, had breakfast with friends after one of our Runyon excursions and while my husband went to the Rose Parade he and I took a long walk to the parkand back then hung out, watching the parade on TV then the Rose Bowl game.

It was relaxing. I found myself letting go of "the push," allowing for flow to happen.  There is no urgency. There is no deadline. The only deadline is when I die and really that’s just a transition to another energy field, so why not take it easy, be kind, look into the eyes of not only my dear ones, but every ONE? What’s all this desperate scrambling about? Why can’t things just unfold? It’s like taking this hard, hard clay of determination and driven-ness and pouring water over it until it softens, softens and can be gently molded into a work or art, something smooth and curved, something that never would have come forth had it been kept in a clenched ball, not allowed to breathe, to open up. 

I go into 2007 knowing that there are still many doors in my psyche that need to be pried open so that the fresh air of gratitude and joy can flow into the dusty and musty corners of old thinking. In my writing, my thoughts, spoken words and deeds I am ready for more beauty, grace and kindness to be present. In each of us there is the most profound wonder that exists–that unique combination and permutation of time, space and circumstances that is who we are, the only one that ever was and ever will be, who is uniquely me and perfectly you. It’s pretty heady stuff when you think about it. Seems like a big waste if you don’t run with it, or swim, or fly with it. So, for you my prayer is that each minute of each hour of each day of the coming year be a bounty of blessings, whether they look or taste or feel like it, they always are and may you look in the mirror and love that crooked nose, wrinkles around the eyes, the funny way your mouth tilts. It’s all perfect, simply because it is.

The Lake Shrine in Pacific Palisades at the Self Realization Fellowship Center 

Holiday Dinner with (left to right) Lori, Jane, Me, Hubbie & Dr. Theo 

The Family at Runyon Canyon 

Breakfast at Hugo’s in Hollywood with friends. 

 
Sleeping in and snuggling with Yoshi. 

*********** 

A Man in His Life

A man in his life has no time to have
Time for everything.
He has no room to have room
For every desire. Ecclesiastes was wrong to claim that.

A man has to hate and love all at once,
With the same eyes to cry and to laugh
With the same hands to throw stones
And to gather them,
Make love in war and war in love.

And hate and forgive and remember and forget
And order and confuse and eat and digest
What long history does
In so many years.

A man in his life has no time.
When he loses he seeks
When he finds he forgets
When he forgets he loves
When he loves he begins forgetting.

And his soul is knowing
And very professional,
Only his body remains an amateur
Always. It tries and fumbles.
He doesn’t learn and gets confused,
Drunk and blind in his pleasures and pains.

In autumn, he will die like a fig,
Shriveled, sweet, full of himself.
The leaves dry out on the ground,
And the naked branches point
To the place where there is time for everything.

Yehuda Amichai
Yehuda Amichai: A Life of Poetry: 1948-1994
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.   

When I was growing up our family always drove to the valley, to Portland from our small town of Redmond, to be with my mother’s family for the Christmas holidays. It was a large tribe: Nana and Papa, Aunt Mary & Uncle Vince and their brood of seven (each kid in our family matched up in age with one of theirs), Uncle Butch & Aunt Alice, Auntie’s Dodi & Anna, who lived with Nana and Papa in the house where they were born, (where all ten of their children were born) and numerous other aunts, uncles and cousins racing in and out. These holidays were the highlight of the otherwise long, cold and school-laden winter; Nana’s raviolis and Aunt Mary’s cherry pie, the football games, the banter of the Uncles, playing Scrabble with the Aunt’s and exploring the streets and surrounds of the big city. Nana’s house (it was always her house, even after she was gone for twenty years) sat a few hundred yards from the railroad tracks. I loved the sound of it clacking along the rails, the whistle’s sharp call. Tramps and hobos would often come to the back door for a handout, which Nana always gave. The neighborhood was a little Europe, with Italians, Greeks, Irish, Germans, accents from places that were faraway and a little scary to a girl of seven or eight. Next door on the south side of their place was a “haunted” house inhabited by a Boo Radley type and on the other a robust Irish family, with two handsome red-headed boys in their teens.

On the appointed day of departure I would pack my small bag with pajamas, a sweater, long-sleeved shirts, knit pants, socks and mittens. My sisters and brother would do the same. Dad was always the first one out the door and sitting in the car, tooting the horn and hollering out the window to “Get a move on!” or “What are you doing in there, writing a novel?” He didn’t have to pack himself, nor was he subject to any of the last minute preparations like my mother: cleaning the kitchen, turning off all the lights, turning down the furnace, checking each child’s bags to make sure they brought what they needed, packing hers and Dad’s things—not to mention staying up until two or three a.m. the night before wrapping gifts for each cousin and each one of us with Santa Claus or angel wrapping paper, curled ribbon and red, green or gold bows. Dad’s duties were long ago completed—the car had a tank of gas, oil and anti-freeze checked and the heavy box of chains stashed in the back of the station wagon. When the time had arrived to depart (usually at some ungodly pre-noon time) Dad would begin to rattle his keys, yell upstairs and then down into the basement, “Get a move on! It’s time to go and be sure and go to the bathroom before you get in the car.” (This last command repeated several times, with the final one as we were all seated and ready to go in the driveway.) It was always Mom who would run out last, breathless and laughing, while Dad shook his head and honked as she dashed around the front of the car and slid onto the front seat.

(Read on …)

I’ve been a little preoccupied this week with technology. I’m working on a new format for the Poetry Evolution e-letter that will be more professional (or should I say "poefessional"?), as well as setting up the blog so I can record and post audio (and even video) to the site. This is really exciting as I can read poems (mine, yours, the poems I love) and you can click and listen or even download them to your MP3 player to have available whenever you want. I’m in the middle stages of both of these processes and hope to have the audio up and running by the end of the week. The new Poetry Evolution email will launch at the first of the year.

With my head locked into these realms there hasn’t been too much right brain activity. Kinda quiet up in that quadrant. It did occur to me this morning that it might be fun to share with you one of the great parks near by where my husband and I take our dogs to walk. It’s a ten minute walk and three minute drive from our house and I think Yoshi & Ria think it’s a part of their backyard as much as they go there. There’s always a lot going on there (as you’ll see from the pictures) and even though it was kind of quiet when I cruised through this morning, yesterday it was wall to wall with soccer players, basketball, dog agility, joggers, boxers, yoga and dance classes, kids playing on the swingsets, picnicers and always people walking their dogs. So, here’s a taste of Rancho Park.

RAncho Park is on Pico Blvd., across from 20th Century Studios. 

The sidewalk next to the parking lot off of Motor Ave. 

Enough of this posing–can we go play now?  

There are a lot of beautiful trees. These are especially squirrel friendly, which Ria loves. 

The public golf course which runs alongside the park. 

Always soccer going on. Saturday was kids day and they ranged in size from peewee to teen. 

For More Photos

(Read on …)

It’s 85 degrees out today. Hard to get into the holiday spirit, though I did truck off to Trader Joes and Whole Foods to get pumpkin pies, whipped cream, yams, butter and pecans for my portion of our community potluck. I’ve been focusing on eliminating some of the richer foods in my diet so I’m not particularly excited about facing the four table spread that awaits on Thursday. I’d like to steer away from the food part of Thanksgiving and really, the historical piece of it doesn’t particularly enthrall me, although the reality that the settlers actually sat down with Native Americans and had a peaceful meal together must be saluted considering what ensued in the following two hundred years. I don’t particularly feel like counting my blessings or walking about in a delirium of gratitude (although I am blessed with a terrific life and am most, most thankful for all the love and support and prosperity).

What is it I’d really like to do this weekend? Just carry on, really, not do anything overly special. A movie would be nice—haven’t seen a new release at a theater in a few months. A walk on the beach with my husband, maybe drive south to Long Beach and take the dogs to the dog beach there—a family outing. I love to play games with friends, but not sure that’s going to happen this time as my good friend, who usually hosts the game night, is recuperating from surgery.

I’d like to write. I’ve been organizing my files, putting poems and essays into specific folders so I’ll know what stage of the process they’re in: Ready to Submit for Publication or Revisions in Progress or the sad Uncertain Fate. I’d like to get a couple of submissions out in the mail by Monday, have my essays all printed, 3-hole punched and snapped into the binder marked “Manuscript” that sits on the shelf to the right of me. Reading, yes, that’s a must, at least catch up on a couple of journals I want to leaf through, articles I’ve downloaded on publishing your manuscript, a novel that I’m two chapters into and a half-dozen other books that give me the come-over-here-and-pick-me-up eye every time I pass by them. If the weather turns and a chill should hit the air, a few clouds blow in or (hardly likely) rain should actually fall, then DVD’s, popcorn, a fire in the fireplace, leftovers warmed in the microwave, the Twilight Zone marathon or The Wizard of Oz, and hanging out on the couch at home sounds fabulous.

In truth, this holiday I’m doing a new thing. I’m going with the flow. I’m not fighting it or immersing myself in it. I’m showing up where I need to, where I want to and where the days lead me. It just feels right to do it that way. All around, I’m sure I’ll come out a lot more relaxed and more thankful when Monday rolls around. That’s the theory, anyway. I hope you have the Thanksgiving you most want and that giving and thanking swirl around you and in you, as well as every one you love.

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding.

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.

Sylvia Plath

How Happy is the Little Stone

How happy is the little Stone
That rambles in the Road alone,
And doesn’t care about Careers
And Exigencies never fears—
Whose Coat of elemental Brown
A passing Universe put on,
And independent as the Sun
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute Decree
In casual simplicity—

Emily Dickinson

I was surprised to find the poem “Why Regret?” in the new volume of Galway Kinnell’s poetry. I had just been thinking about regret on Sunday while driving to the airport on my way back to L.A. from Oregon. I don’t know why it came up, maybe it was because I was in my old-stomping grounds, where I grew up and made so, so many blunders, as adolescents and teenagers have a proclivity to do. Maybe it was because I always have second thoughts after I speak in front of a crowd, immediately have a hundred different thoughts about what I could have said better, or why didn’t I say thank you to so-and-so, or tell a good joke or story, or slow down when I read, look up and smile at the audience, etc.

When the word “regret” passed through me my first thought was that it was such a small and pitiful emotion, that it was the forerunner of guilt and remorse and shame, all of which have the power to rend a human being helpless in having any kind of happiness in their lives. Oh, I’m not saying that we should bounce along doing all sorts of nasty and self-serving acts, have no sense of the harm we cause others by our actions and feel we completely deserve to get off scot-free. I fully agree it’s important to own up to where you’ve let others down, brought suffering or just plain been a jerk. You could say it comes down to semantics and I guess I see regret as another one of those heavy stones that you put in your sack of woes and drag around with you, along with resentment, hurt, grudges, etc, until you can’t walk, can hardly stand up straight anymore.

Reflection, realization and responsibility all seem to be more productive “re” words to me in healing and moving on in life. I love that Kinnell’s poem never once addresses the question of “Why Regret?” directly. He shows us everything to not regret, beautiful, tender, wild, images that fill us everyday with wonder: “ironworkers / sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable” and “the wren / and how little flesh is needed to make a song” and “pinworms as some kind of tiny batons / giving cadence to the squeezes and releases / around the downward march of debris.” If we must regret (and I believe it is possible to not), then regret only a little, only a fraction of what you have beheld in life, maybe three per-cent, at most five. For the other, the ninety-five to ninety-seven look around, inhale, reach out, swallow, lie down in a shallow stream, look into the eyes of a child, meditate so deeply you forget where you are and who you are. These are places where regret and guilt and shame do not survive. This is joy. This is the “mayfly struggling free,” the monarch’s “inner blazonry.” This is waking in the night to, “find ourselves / holding hands in our sleep.”

Galway Kinnell

Why Regret?

Didn’t you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating the glue off?
Weren’t you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn’t it a revelation to waggle
from the estuary all the way up the river,
the kill, the pirle, the run, the rent, the beck,
the sike barely trickling, to the shock of a spring?
Didn’t you almost shiver, hearing book lice
clicking their sexual dissonance inside an old
Webster’s New International, perhaps having just
eaten of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lies in wait anyway
at the end of the world whose sub-substance
is glaim, gleet, birdlime, slime, mucus, muck?
Forget about becoming emaciated. Think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn’t it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
broke open and the imago, the true adult,
somersaulted out and took flight, seeking
the swarm, mouth-arts vestigial,
alimentary canal come to a stop,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova took up the platter
of linguine in squid’s ink and slid the stuff
out the window, telling his startled companion,
“The perfected lover does not eat.”
As a child, didn’t you find it calming to imagine
pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn’t you glimpse in the monarchs
what seemed your own inner blazonry
flapping and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren’t you reassured to think these flimsy
hinged beings, and then their offspring,
and their offspring’s offspring, could
navigate, working in shifts, all the way to Mexico,
to the exact plot, perhaps the very tree,
by tracing the flair of the bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn’t it outdo the pleasure of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?

Galway Kinnell
Strong Is Your Hold
Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers

On Thursday in my home town of Redmond, Oregon a high school auditorium will be dedicated to my father, Clyde Moore. He is 85 and lives in Portland with my mother. He was the band teacher in the Redmond school system for 28 years, teaching in grades five through twelve. In a few short years he put our little town of 5000 residents on the map by developing one of the top bands in the state. He dedicated his life to the kids and to music. He spent evenings in the spring and summer marching the band through the town’s streets in preparation for the County Fair, Spud Festival and often the Rose Parade in Portland where we wore our military style uniforms of maroon with gold trim. There was a Christmas Concert in December and a Pops Concert in the spring. There was a dance band and marching and pep bands for the football and basketball games. We competed individually at recitals all over the state and as a group went to band competitions and festivals all over the country, including Hawaii, Canada and Mexico.

Dad was big on practicing and being one of his kids I was expected to tow the line. I played the flute in the concert band, piccolo and sometimes cymbals in the marching band. My older brother played the clarinet and saxophone and was by far the best musician in the family. My sisters and I did the best we could and were fairly competitive in vying for the “chairs” in the section that we played. I look back on it now and I suppose I would have been better suited to sing in the choir than play an instrument, but the choir was the ugly stepchild to band in those days, and of course, my father would not have heard of it. Band was his life and therefore our life. It was important that we play and it was doubly important that we play well. It was a tough row to hoe at times but, as time has the ability to do, I see now where there were so many gifts in being in the band, most of all it was being a part of something—something that brought these rowdy, headstrong, and terribly insecure teenagers together in a common endeavor. We were expected to excel, to show up, dress up and damn well do our best out there. We were part of the band, part of his band.

God, I haven’t thought about it in so long. I can see the band room at the high school; the practice and instrument rooms the windows along the north side facing the street where yellow school buses loaded and unloaded twice a day, the tiered risers set in a semi-circle with the director’s podium at their center, my father’s glassed in office in the corner, the smell of the cleaning oil, the squeak of tennis shoes and scrape of chairs on the brown tiled floor. I remember my flute in it’s felt lined case, pulling it out, twisting the three pieces together, blowing into the cold mouthpiece, starting with C and running up and down the scales, my fingers knowing exactly when to lift and when to fall. I remember turning to Carol or Betsy in first chair and leaning in to them, tuning to their C, the whole band tuning, woodwinds, brass, percussion tapping and rumbling in the background. I remember the rap-rap of the baton on the music stand, looking up to see my six-foot father raising his right arm in an arc, the look of authority in his eyes and posture, the look that bodes no monkey-business, that lets every one in that room know exactly who’s in charge and we are about to begin and you better stop goofing off and pay attention
while you’re in his classroom.

I know it was impossible then, but now when I go back and look up from my chair in the front row, brush away my drooping bangs and teenage angst and rebellion, when I look now at the imposing figure of this man, my father, my teacher, I see so clearly the heart and soul of someone who loved what he did, gave everything he had to impart courage and confidence in his students and I if I listen closely I am sure I will hear softly flowing out of his cloaked heart and into all of us sitting there, all of us who would be forever changed by him, the rhythmic, melodic, and entrancing wonder that is music.

My parents in San Diego right after they were married and he was still a Navy man.

This must have been in the fifties when I was still in diapers.

The concert band. If you get your microscope out you can see I’m the third flute on the left, first row (after Betsy & Nancy, of course).

The Pep Band at a basketball game.

At the football game–a page out of my junior yearbook.

*****

Here’s a poem I wrote this summer on his 85th birthday when I was at our house in Sisters. It came while I was looking out the window at the tall grass moving in the breeze.

Spirito

In slanted light long grasses sway, bow
to the east, a swirling concert of blades—

flats and sharps, tempo and cadence, allegro,
andante, pianissimo, piano, oh, insistent forte,

intrepid crescendo, glide of diminuendo,
flaming sky cantata slurs to lengthy shadows.

And the winds rest and the woods fall dark.
Still the roots play on…dolce, dolce, dolce.