Locomotive Breath

On By ps pirroIn morning poems

To know that it has always been so —
the angry mob, the fist and the fury —
knowing doesn’t help at all.

It doesn’t help at all.

Today I took an online test
to see what mathematics I might recall
from decades of long ago learning,

word problems concerning trains and speed
and distance, angles of intersecting lines
and percentages and ratios.

And I failed and was not surprised
by my failure.

I knew all that, once, how to calculate
across time and space, the train of the fist
and the rails of the fury, and knowing
helped not at all,

the train it won’t stop going,
no way to slow down.

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Late Summer

On By ps pirroIn and so it goes, writing life

Here’s the thing: I’m not much of a writer these days. I’m just a journal-keeper. A Morning Page scribbler of handwritten notes about bills in need of paying and cat boxes in need of tending.

It’s not writing.

I’m not even sure if this is writing.

Typing, maybe. I’ve always been a good typist.

Late summer, and the yard is utterly overgrown. I wave to my neighbor through the tangle of grapevine overtaking the north side of my little lot. Things grow so fast here. I mow a path alongside the explosion of honeysuckle. Volunteer mulberry trees appear out of nowhere, three feet tall before I even notice them. How can that be?

Out back, behind the house, I keep a far corner of the lot untouched. It’s shaded and wooded. More grapevine attaches to the side of my garage, climbs across the shingled roof. My insurance company tells me it all must go, that the vines and young trees are a threat to the integrity of the structure. But this is Indiana, and the abundant flora will have its way. I’m shopping for a new insurance company.

The Oval One was in town last week. It was billed as a rally, which is to say, a campaign event. It never ends, the campaigning. I’m sure they called it that so they could toss out the nonbelievers, of which there were a few. Two of my friends were there, dressed as Handmaids, in red cloaks and white bonnets. One of them even made it into the venue, before being escorted back out to the sidewalk by two men who weren’t interested in parsing her First Amendment rights.

I listened to a livestream of his remarks. I won’t do that again.

You couldn’t call it a speech. There was lot of chanting by the audience. “Lock her up, lock her up.” “Build the wall, build the wall.” So many things were so very great, the greatest, the biggest, the strongest, the most amazingly amazing.

He’s a midway huckster, and we Americans do love a circus.

It will not surprise me if he’s re-elected in 2020. Such are the times.

So my writing practice is giving me grief, perhaps in part because the huckster is sucking all the oxygen out of the room. I am light-headed, in need of something I know not what.  I go outside and breathe in the last of the fragrant honeysuckle, and tell myself I’ll cut it back to a manageable size next spring.

If It Breaks

On By ps pirroIn and so it goes5 Comments

Was it ever the case that the times weren’t hard and the money wasn’t short? So asked Emerson, friend of Henry by the Pond, gentle scold and scholar. I remind myself of this when the times feel too hard, the money too short.

The cicadas thrum in the humid August evening and the air conditioning kicks in. Luxury.

A decade ago this fall, as I approached a Significant Birthday, I was hard at work on a book. It was to be my first, and I was determined to publish it before that birthday. It didn’t need to be great, or even good. It just had to be real, and it had to be done.

It got done.

Two others followed, poetry collections. All self-published, because why not? When I was younger (so much younger than today) I dreamed of being a writer, and so I am.

I am not famous. I don’t care about fame. I like words, strung out along the page, making meaning where they can, meeting up with a reader and making yet another meaning. Different, because we are all so very different.

And yet we are so much the same, in our love for words and our desire to inhabit a creative life.

What is that, a creative life?

My friend Eric carves bears out of giant logs. Every so often he and his spouse load up a trailer and take his chainsaw bears to a flea market in Louisville to sell them. I don’t think he’s motivated by the prospect of a sale when he’s carving. I think he carves to carve. And then there are suddenly all these bears, and a trip to Louisville is in order.

I think it’s like that with words, too. That there are suddenly so many of them, and a book is in order.

When I was painting more, my paintings would accumulate until there was no room in the house for them. What then?

I don’t know what you might do, but I opened a little gallery. In it I put my own paintings, and the paintings and artwork of friends. Chainsaw-bear Eric contributed a sculpture of a bird. With an egg. When he brought it to me I didn’t realize the egg was an actual egg, it’s innards blown out through a tiny pinhole, leaving only the perfect, delicate shell.

Which I dropped.

Yes.

He came back with another egg. Because that’s what you do.

Times are always hard. Money is always short. So? Make the art anyway. If it breaks, you can make it again. There’s always another egg, somewhere.

As I Get To It

On By ps pirroIn and so it goes

So I didn’t go dark, exactly, except for a couple weeks when I set about remaking my website and didn’t want you to see all the nail-holes in the walls from where I moved things and hadn’t yet applied the patches.

Still applying patches. Yes.

But I did go away, which is sometimes the best (only) thing to do.

And now I’m back, maybe for a moment, maybe for longer. Coming up for air, looking for my pen and paper, waiting for a song.

I am rethinking. And not thinking. Trying and not trying. Working my way through a slush pile of possibilities. One thing and then the next.

As I get to it.

No Time at All

On By ps pirroIn and so it goes

Bodhichitta practice. Slow.

Not striving for. Not reaching for.

We breathe into the heart center
and find it armored.
Of course it’s armored.
We breathe anyway.

Like making friends with a feral cat.
We sit nearby. For a day, or a week.
Then we sit alongside.
No demands.

A day is a long time.
A lifetime is no time at all.

It rained overnight.
The snow fell this morning.
Now the wind blows.

Preppers

On By ps pirroIn and so it goes, morning poems1 Comment

It took longer than any of us expected,
our children were older than we were
and theirs were older still,
I remember when the fortune in your cookie said
be like water and you said who has that kind of time?

The soles of your boots are worn now right through
at the place where the weight of the world
met the road that carried us here, all those footsteps,
all that leather, all those people we used to be,
they cling like shadows and hide when we turn.

Did you ever think, I ask, and no, you never did,
we blink like mole people, blinded by the light,
both of us knowing we got it all wrong,
you with your gun, me with my bowl,
you with no bullets, me with no spoon.

Linda’s Little Bookshop

On By ps pirroIn and so it goes

Does it pay to own a small bookstore? It’s a bit like asking if it pays to be a poet.
Seth Godin, The Domino Project

My friend Linda runs a used bookstore at the Zion center where my café is located.  I  envy her that shop.

Two slow weeks back-to-back at the cafe have fed that envy.

Books can wait in ways that a plate of food cannot. Books won’t go bad if allowed to sit out overnight. You can stock a wide variety of books to accommodate differing tastes.  Sampling is easy, and doesn’t require napkins or toothpicks or little plastic pill cups.

A book that’s been on your shelf for a year is as fresh as it was the day you brought it in.

And the health department won’t cite you for an inadequate number of sinks in your shop or the improper placement of the trash can.

So what if it doesn’t pay? Aren’t you tired of every choice hinging on whether or not it pays?

(Yes. Yes, I am.)

Seth Godin again: “(B)ooks are an excuse to have a business, but they’re not a business.”

I don’t care.

In my next incarnation I’m going to run a little shop like Linda’s. If nothing else, I’ve got all kinds of experience with things that don’t pay.